READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

ATHENS . 478—401 B.C.

CHAPTER XIV

HERODOTUS AND THUCYDIDES

THERE were heroes before Agamemnon, and historians before Herodotus, albeit Cicero dubbed him Father of History. The beginnings of Greek historiography were not a sudden creation. Imperfection of the record here, as elsewhere, induces an illusion. Herodotus and Thucydides appear to stand, together and alone, an elder and a younger contemporary, as earth-born colossi, to guard the portal of Greek history, that is to say, of Greek prose literature. But others had been at work there before them, to whom they owed, and Herodotus in especial owed, more than appears at first sight. He was not so much the sole begetter of a new type of literature, as the last and best in a procession of prose-writers, long at home in Ionia. Neither Herodotus nor Thucydides admits a conscious debt to those their predecessors. By a remarkable coincidence each names but one such author, and that in disparaging terms, the former Hecataeus of Miletus, the latter Hellanicus the Lesbian, who can hardly be reckoned among the predecessors of our elder historian, though his work belonged to a type almost as rudimentary in comparison with the panoramic achievement of Herodotus as with the reflective depth of the Thucydidean records. Contrasted with our extant historians of the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars these early Logographoi may well have seemed but as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the true temple-builders. Of a truth, with Herodotus and Thucydides, History as an art was born, indeed twice-born, in romantic and in classic perfection; and to their supremacy as literary artists may be ascribed the triumphant survival of their works. The bequests of their archaic predecessors could not compete for popularity, could not compare in memorable quality, with works conceived on the scale and accomplished with the felicity displayed by those supreme artists. But, the indubitable originality of Herodotus and Thucydides is exaggerated for us by the disappearance of the Logographoi, and the twofold suspicion will haunt us: that historical science has suffered by the wreck of those pioneers, and that their successors owed them a larger debt than we can now verify.

Historians in antiquity suffered certain limitations, which the progress of civilization has diminished to the advantage of modern scholars, not excepting those concerned with the rediscovery of the ancient world. The prolegomena to history are written by the mathematician, the astronomer, the geologist, the anthropologist. Time and place are conditions of the historic event; some sort of chronology, some sort of geography, of the historical record. From the days of Homer onwards the Greeks were never wholly at a loss for a measure of time past, or for a picture of their own environment; and sages of Ionia from I hales to Anaxagoras made preparation by a philosophy of nature for that proper study of mankind, of which the works of Herodotus and Thucydides were to be the glorious first-fruits in due season. There was yet a further condition for the birth of history which in especial made the harvest both difficult and late. Only the State has a history. The Hegelian paradox rightly interpreted is eternally true and suggestive. The monadic form of Greek civilization, the multiplicity of centres of Hellenic life, the dispersion of Greek settlements east and west and north and south, from the Phasis to the Pillars of Heracles, from Odessa to Cyrene, the self-sufficiency of each independent city-state, at once the strength and the weakness of Hellenism, made a history of Greece, and still make it, the despair of your man of letters. For purposes of historic record antecedent civilizations, inferior to Hellas in cultural value—the great monarchies of Egypt and Asia—were fortunate in comparison with the petty republics of the Hellenic world. Successions of kings, ruling over large and populous territories, provided a chronology, almost ready-made, for the State-archives; and the power and pride of warriors and priests, free to immortalize themselves in tomb and temple for the homage, or the derision, of posterity, secured a sort of perspective from generation to generation. Again, the dynastic State, however extensive, was still a geographical unit: the writ of Hammurabi or Ramses ran the length and breadth of the land: an empire furnished history with geographical data for descriptive and memorial purposes. But within the area of Greek history and culture, from the coming of the Aaeans to the invasion of Xerxes, there was no political sovran that could claim a universal or even a provincial jurisdiction. Unity of a kind was there, a spiritual, a growing unity: religion, language, institutions, manners, ideas, sentiments, all tending that way. Nay, more: groupings, crystallizations, amphictyonies, synoecisms, round one or other of the stronger or more attractive nuclei—a Delphi, a Thebes, an Athens, centres in the Peloponnese, in Ionia, in Magna Graecia, in Libya, even on the coasts of Pontus, or away to the wild west; but there was still no seeing the wood by reason of the trees, and no man conceived the possibility of a common Hellenic history, or sat down to write it. It was, then, no accident that the Prince of Ionian History came to write his unrivalled account of the achievements of the Greek world as he knew it, or knew of it, in the third quarter of the fifth century before our era: that is to sav, just after the Greeks had been schooled into something more nearly approaching a single, even if brief-lived incorporation, by the attacks of the massed forces of the ‘Barbarian' upon their liberties and institutions. Nor was it an accident that in depicting the heroic effort of the Greek complex to save itself—and thereby to save Europe, as yet unborn—for freedom, for science, for civilization, he found himself drawn to enrich his ample record by such report of the non-Hellenic world, whether civilized or savage, as his researches and his experiences enabled him to make for the profit and the pleasure of all ages. But the genius and the industry whereby Herodotus contrived to mould so far-flung an argument, with such apparent ease of heart and lightness of touch, into so large and perfect a work of literary art as we still possess, in his Logoi are wonderful, thrice wonderful, especially when we consider the technical difficulties of such an achievement in the fifth century before our era, and within the normal horizons of the Greek city-state.

In some respects Thucydides hit upon a more excellent way, or at least contrived to simplify the historian’s problem. From the first the Logographi had eased their burden by restricting their researches in subject, as in time and place. Their works comprised genealogies, chronicles, dynastic lists, mythologic legends, special studies in city or family archives, geography, itineraries and voyage-routes, some of them perhaps with a practical reference. And, further, the short story had made its appearance in Greek prose long before Herodotus incorporated that genre too in his larger logography. Thucydides returned from the wider interests of his immediate exemplar to specialist methods, with a difference; and obtained a simplification of his task by a restriction of his subject to a single war: the point of greatest difference being, that he was contemporary with his dramatis personae* and was writing, with a limited reference, the history of his own times.

Thucydides, again, might seem to score against Herodotus the advantage of simplicity under the geographical conditions of their respective subjects. The narrative of Thucydides hardly quits the familiar scenes of Greek life and experience. Doubtless maps of the Hellenic peninsula and the Mediterranean coasts and Islands, drawn by Thucydides, would have shown distortions and mismeasurements: but even if his accounts of marches and voyages may not always accord with our scientific maps, the error is rarely of much importance, while his actual or implicit topography, as of Athens and Syracuse, Sphacteria and Amphipolis, and even larger districts, is generally verifiable and authoritative. As much may almost be said for Herodotus, when he is working, so to speak, merely upon the Thucydidean scale, albeit in much more numerous and widely scattered scenes. The description of Thessaly, the topography of Artemisium and Thermopylae, the structure of Central Greece, Attica and Peloponnese, the coasts of the Aegean, Hellespont and Bosporus, though not figured in the mind of Herodotus with the precision and correctness of modern cartography, form a verifiable theatre for his narrative, and exhibit an immense advance in empirical knowledge upon the resources of the Homeric age. And the explicit geography of Herodotus expands, with the growth and development of his historical theme, to the limits of the civilized world, as then known to its inhabitants, and even well beyond. Travel and hear-say and (we may safely add) the treatises of Hecataeus and other Ionian geographers extended and enriched the mappa mundi as conceived, or drawn, by Herodotus; and his work undoubtedly represents the geographical knowledge, and speculation, of the age of Pericles in palmary form, The colonial diaspora of the Greeks in the period subsequent to the Trojan epoch: the re­opening of Egypt to foreigners by the twenty-sixth dynasty: above all, the rise and extension of the Persian empire under the Achaemenid kings, are, perhaps, enough to account for the vast contrast between the Herodotean geography and that of Homer, or even that Ionian orbis terrarum displayed on the bronze plaque which the Milesian Aristagoras exhibited at Sparta about the year 500 b.c. showing every sea and every river in the world.

Herodotus himself claims to have superseded all that, and even makes fun of the old Ionian essays in cartography, which still treated the earth as a circular disk, with the Ocean-stream flowing round it, and made the continents huge islands parted by the sweet waters of Tanais and Nile. His own world-geography is, however, based upon supposed parallelisms and symmetries, for which there is but little justification in fact: as, for example, the too systematic zones in Libya, on the supposed parallel between the courses of Nile and Danube. What is of major significance is the respect for facts, where they were, or could be, ascertained, which led Herodotus to acquiesce in a Europe and an Asia of unknown extent and boundaries, north and east: an admirable example of suspended judgment. The cadastral survey presupposed in his descriptions of the Persian empire goes far to account for the relatively high standard of Asiatic geography in the pages of Herodotus; but the defects and omissions in his map of the Western Mediterranean and its hinterlands can hardly be excused by the predominance of Carthage in these waters. The Phocaeans had been in occupation of Massilia for upwards of a century; Herodotus does not report the fact though he once casually mentions the city; and Siceliotes and Italiotes must surely have known much more of the western world than appears in the pages of Herodotus. The total omission of Rome is less astonishing than the suppression of the Rhone, the conversion of the Alps into a river, the reduction of the Pyrenees to a problematic city of the same name! But these mistakes, which further travel or hear-say might have corrected, are less important for our estimate of the progress of geographical knowledge, as attested by Herodotus, than his critical reference to the tin islands, beyond the Pillars of Heracles, his rumour of a great river (Niger) in the west of Libya (Africa), the happy accident by which he conceived the Caspian Sea as an inland lake (a point in which his geography is superior to that of his successors, not excepting Strabo), or his remarkably scientific delimitation of Europe and Asia by a frontier running east and west—a conception in which physical fact and ethnic history combine to justify him, even against the conventions of modern geography. And though Thucydides certainly names Massilia and was acquainted with the story of its foundation, as with that of the Greek settlements In Sicily, there is not much to show that he could have bettered the general map of the inner seas, as reconstructed from the data of Herodotus.

Chronological conditions and results carry reflections somewhat similar to the foregoing. Greek chronographers, even as late as the fifth century, were at a disadvantage, compared with the palace or temple recorders of Memphis or of Babylon. Scientific prerequisites for a better chronology had indeed made considerable progress: the enneadekateris of Meton (still in practical use, at least for ecclesiastical purposes) was published in Athens just before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War; and that city had enjoyed a reformed Calendar, of approximate accuracy, since the Archonship of Solon (594-3 b.c.), as Herodotus quaintly implies in his famous report of the Athenian legislator’s bio-chronological calculations in the presence of Croesus (1, 32). But the political atomism of the Greek world still made a common chronometry a mere desideratum: every Greek state had its own civil reckoning: the four possible points for New Year’s day were all adopted in various local systems: anil the plan for an approximate standardi­zation by reference to the periodicity of the national festivals, notably the Olympian Agon, was not devised or applied to historiography till three-quarters of a century after the close of the Peloponnesian War. From our present point of view it were better had Thucydides carried his Atticism into his chronology, boldly and systematically dating events by Attic years, months, and days of the month, lie was on the verge of that invention, when he dated the outbreak of the war, in the year of Pythodorus, two (or, rather, four) months before its close’, but missed his great chance and devised instead a chronology for the war based upon its intrinsic duration and seasonal division into summers and winters. That left a great deal to be desired from a modern point of view; and though the sequence of events, and occasionally their synchronisms, are preserved by the scrupulous industry of the contemporary narrator, his rather jejune annalistic method breaks down in application to the interval between the two main wars, or divisions of the war, the ten years Archidamian War and the ten years DeceleoIonian War; while for the history of the antecedents of the war it was obviously inapplicable. Indeed, the Retrospect of the events of the Pentecontaetia, that is, the interval between the retreat of the Persian from Europe and the invasion of Attica by Archidamus in 431 b.c., is lamentably deficient in chronological data and precision; while in his aperçus of remoter history Thucydides had obviously nothing better than the genealogical calculations of the old Logographoi or Chronographoi to go upon. Yet the modern reconstruction of the chronology of ancient history is deeply indebted to the chronology of Thucydides, such as it is: for upon his incidental notices of certain eclipses of sun and moon, dated by his narrative to the years of the war in which they occurred, the whole framework and verification of our chronology of ancient Greek history depend. The advantage of the contemporary over the not quite contemporary authority in such matters is illustrated by the fact that we cannot ascribe an equal value to notices of eclipses preserved by Herodotus, which are, one and all, rather problems of identification, than astronomically verified pillars for the reconstruction of the true perspective of the past.

But for the rest it cannot fairly be said that the chronology of Herodotus compares unfavourably with that of Thucydides, especially if regard be had to the intrinsic character of their narratives respectively. Where he is dealing with a single war on what may be called a Thucydidean scale Herodotus holds his own with his immediate successor. The Herodotean chronology of the invasion of Xerxes (481—79) as exhibited in the last three Books of his work compares favourably with the Thucydidean chronology of the Pentecontaetia, even if it be not so full, and self-consistent as, let us say, the account of the Sicilian expedition of 415—13, as narrated by Thucydides in his sixth and seventh Books. Incidentally, too, Herodotus enables us by the sincerity of his report to appreciate chronological points of special interest, the values of which were not, or were not fully, present to his own mind: as, for example, the synchronistic fighting at Thermopylae and Artemisium, the synchronisms between the battles of Himera and Salamis, of Plataea and Mycale, the occurrence of an Olympic Festival, of an Eleusinian pilgrimage and so on.

Working backwards in his pages from the accession of Xerxes (486 b.c.) the chronology of Greek history exhibits, we must confess, more and more defects inevitable under the conditions above indicated. The clearer and more trustworthy lines are based on the succession of Persian monarchs, on the pedigrees of Spartan kings, on traditions connected with great Athenian Houses, Peisistratidae, Philaidae, Alcmaeonidae, and possibly others, back to Solon, with whom the continuous story of Athens, so far as recoverable from Herodotus, begins. The Lydian monarchy, from Croesus upwards, adds a perspective of some five reigns, or generations, back to Gyges, whom we now know to have been contemporary with Ashurbanipal and Psamatik. It was not in Babylon or Susa that Herodotus obtained still earlier glimpses of remote peoples and cultures, but in Egypt, among the monuments of six and twenty dynasties, from the calculations of native authorities, or the reports of Greeks, who had appropriated such researches. Of the value of such traditions of the non-hellenic world something remains to be said later. For the origines of Greek history, so far as he treats them, Herodotus had access to stores of tradition, already committed to writing; this material, so far as chronologized, probably owed its datings to the genealogies of the aristocratic families all over Greece, which rarely carried back beyond five centuries, and broke down, or up, into the eponymous hero, or god, this side the Trojan war. Pre-homeric Greece can hardly be said to exist for Herodotus, albeit he accepts the myths and legends of the prime; a Heracles, a Theseus, a Minos are historical figures for him, as for Thucydides. The unity which he obtains for his encyclopaedia as a whole has little to say to chronological niceties, least of all in annalistic precision; but there is a thread of continuous history running through it, from the coming of Cyrus, or even from the liberation of Lydia and Egypt to the defeat of Xerxes, or, we might add, in view of references to contemporary events, almost to the death of Artaxerxes (424 b.c.); and in these references he is as much the contemporary authority as Thucydides himself.

In what may, perhaps, with a somewhat extended connotation, be called the anthropological aspect of history, the contrast between the minds of Herodotus and Thucydides reaches its maximum. Thucydides was a rationalist, and his conception of historical causation is eminently rationalistic. In his view history presents the actions and fortunes of political communities, which are to be understood in the light of political, economic, and psychological factors. Thucydides is too good a psychologist to underestimate the importance of individual character and ability in human affairs: a Themistocles, a Pericles, a Nicias, an Alcibiades, a Theramenes are all in turn dominant agents in the policy of Athens: the deaths of a Brasidas, a Cleon, are important moments in the decisions for peace. Yet Thucydides has a highly impersonal method of narrative, an objective and matter of fact point of view, congruous with his deliberately adopted annalistic scheme, which orders events (with rare exceptions) in their purely empirical sequence. Such a scheme can be combined, as in the Annals of Tacitus, with a result which is essentially biographical; but Thucydides would never have exchanged the annals of the War, much less the history of Athens, for the biography of an individual, however eminent.

Above all, the world of Thucydides is a world of men: gods and women are conspicuous only by their absence, or in the rare and grudging references which he allows himself to make to their existence. His account of the plague at Athens, though it contains an autobiographical note, is a palmary instance of his conscientious objectivity, even if it have not enabled modern pathologists to identify the disease. His religious agnosticism could have been no detriment to the quality of his history, had it been confined to the omission of the gods of Greece from the sphere of secondary causation: but in so far as it leads him to ignore the part played by supernaturalism in determining human action, his historical argument may have suffered. At certain points, indeed, the ‘laicism’ (so to speak) of Thucydides gives way to a recognition of the religious coefficient in politics and morals, as in the vogue of oracles at the outbreak of the war: the disastrous effects of the mutilation of the Hermae on the eve of the Sicilian Expedition: the costly superstition which delayed the Athenian retreat in 413, and sealed the fate of that ill-starred adventure. But theophanies and special providences, or any rationale transcending the recognized gamut of human motives, or natural causes, are out of count in the historiography of Thucydides. In discommoning Das Ewigweibliche he even curtails his own resources within the ambit of scientific psychology. The austere puritanism of his outlook, in strongly marked contrast not merely to the contemporary drama but also to the romantic story-telling of his greatest predecessor, may have been at least in part a deliberate though reticent critique of both alike. There were two things he could not abide: the sentimentalism of a Euripides, the pietism of an Herodotus. Thucydides has shown in his rationalist version of the heroic age, that he had little use, in sober prose, for gods or women: therein he but applies to the age of Agamemnon the principles on which he writes—so far as he has written—a history of the age of Pericles. Over and above this, we can hardly but perceive, in his silent protest against the pietistic and the feminist motives, as historical mechanisms, his indignation with the scandals and tittle-tattle against Pericles current at the outbreak of the war, which are pretty fully documented in Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, and have left a smudge on the jocund pages of Aristophanes, as in his droll parody of the Proem of Herodotus. All that is simply ignored in the account given by Thucydides of the natural antecedents of the war, which was to him (as every war has been to its historian) the most inevitable war in human history: and within limits it may be admitted that a motivation of human action proper enough to despotic monarchies, or even the courts of City tyrants, might become something of an anachronism in the freer air of Periclean or post-Periclean Athens; and certainly not less so, in the cryptic Senates of her opponents, the ultimately victorious oligarchies. Finally, Thucydides is a master, if not the author, of mob­psychology; though for the mob he has as little respect as Shakespeare himself, and would have made short work of the intervention of the dea ex machina in the first Restoration of Peisistratus, which not a little exercised the good Herodotus, in one of his rare, and perhaps late, moments of rationalistic reflection.

For indeed the general contrast between the two historians, under this heading, is immense. Faking the work of Herodotus as a whole, reading it through as we find it, the double key to history might seem to have been, in his gnomology: cherchez la femme et n’oubliex pas le Dieu! From his racy introduction on the Rapes of Io, Medea, and Helen, through the stories of the accession of Gyges, the fate of Cyrus, the invasion of Egypt, the Scythian expedition, the exploration of the West, and so forth, there is always a woman to account for the trouble. The same motive serves to explain many a minor episode, as in the stories of Pheretime, Demaratus, Miltiades, and others. When the main narrative shifts to homelier scenes, and the Persian monarchy becomes involved in the fortunes of the Greek states, the feminist interest, except for the prominence of his country-woman Artemisia, weakens or falls out, but leaves the first principle of the Herodotean Weltanschauung as the ultimate and sufficient rationale of the march of events. That principle is the conception of the God in History, as a moral power, over-ruling the march of events so as to procure results conformable to man’s sense of justice and desert. Such a conception is even today not alien either to the sincerest religious feeling or to the profoundest philosophy of history. But, introduced into the order of secondary causes, it is apt to work unfortunately twice over: first, by offering an immediate and easy explanation for every occurrence, and so arresting inquiry into the natural nexus and causality of events; secondly, by generating the false and mischievous assumption that human suffering and misfortune imply antecedent wrongdoing and culpability. These results are to be observed passim in the course of the Herodotean ‘exhibition of history.’ And unfortunately a still more vicious twist is given to this rationale of life and experience by the morbid terms in which it is expressed. The God of Herodotus is not merely a ‘just’ but also a ‘jealous,’ an ‘angry,’ and a ‘vindictive’ God. Of the four keys in which Herodotus plays his variations on the theme of the God in history, jealousy is the most pathological; and the divine jealousy is not directed against rival deities, but poured out upon any mortal whose power, or wealth, or felicity raises him much above the general level, and especially so, should he be uplifted in mind thereby: ‘for the divine being suffers none to have proud thoughts save himself.’

Doubtless, as human history is largely a record of the mis­fortunes of men and nations, many of them only too well deserved, a first principle of this kind is in a fair way to a rough verification, and exhibits at any rate a quasi-philosophic advance on the more capricious theurgy of the Homeric world; albeit a Xenophanes had once for all supplied the antidote for such anthropomorphism, and a Sophocles was chanting formulas for the divine law at once more sane and more poetic. Still, if in harmony with a naive folklore Herodotus fills his pages with signs and wonders, theophanies and special providences, yet, in so doing, he is undoubtedly reflecting the average mind of his age and people more fully and truly than the philosophic Thucydides; and on closer inspection you may discover, not without surprise, that neither his prior fallacy of the Divine Jealousy nor his superfluity of secondary interventions of the God or Gods in History, precludes ‘anthropological’ conceptions of the course of human affairs. You might almost come down to Montesquieu to find a firmer grasp on the relation of Physics and Politics, a clearer reference of institutions and arts to climate, soil, flora, fauna, than are displayed by Herodotus, notably in his accounts of Egypt, Scythia, Libya, and even Hellas. “Soft countries breed soft races” is his moral of the whole story: the sea and the moun­tains of Greece, the poverty of her soil, and the isolation of her valleys, made her not merely the home of liberty but the nursery of heroes. On a smaller scale, and for precise problems, Herodotus has explanations natural enough, even if given by the mouths of his dramatis personae. The rationale of the Greek Tyrannis may be recovered as clearly from stories in Herodotus as from the pages of Plato and Aristotle. The victory of the Greeks in the Persian wars is no miracle in the eyes of Herodotus: their advantages in defence, equipment, discipline, mobility, ethos leading, could not be more clearly or consciously displayed than they are in his last three Books. There is not one of his battle-pieces, which does not leave us with a bundle of unresolved problems on hand, but the general result is perfectly rationalized. At times, indeed, he betrays a breath of the sophistic scepticism of the age, which blows more coldly through the pages of Thucydides. The Magi reduced the storm of Magnesia by their incantations—if the wind did not sink of its own accord: Athene appeared in person to stay the flight of the Corinthians from Salamis; but her supposed intervention on behalf of the Athenian tyrant had been ‘the most naive of devices’.

Only in Delphi has the sceptic no standing with Herodotus. The triumphant apology for Apollo’s desertion of Croesus, most pious of founders and benefactors, in the first Book, should be read in connection with the implicit refutation of the charge of medism at Delphi, in the eighth Book, if we would understand the extent to which Hrodotus succumbed to the genius loci. In the former case Herodotus wins an easy victory for the Oracle: a generation that had forgiven Delphi’s friendships with the native tyrant was not likely to condemn its desertion of the Lydian. In the latter case, the eclipse of Delphi in the Periclean world proves that its immunity in the Persian war had lowered the Oracle in the eyes of patriotic Greeks, and that Herodotus’ vindication of Delphi fell on deaf ears, at least in Atticizing circles. To do Herodotus, and Delphi, and perhaps even Athens, full justice we should further compare the Delphic Story of Glaucus (or The fraudulent Trustee), in the sixth Book, the austere morality of which, with its touch of almost Kantian quality, goes far to explain the prestige of the Oracle, despite its unfortunate essays in international politics. All three stories were undoubtedly posted to the address of Athens, though less explicitly than the partisan utterance just before the Peloponnesian War, preserved for us by Thucydides : but Herodotus himself seems an unconscious victim and vehicle for these pragmatic fictions. So much easier to the anthropo­logist is the critique of supernaturalism than the detection of the politic subtleties of human nature.

Enough perhaps has already been here set down to suggest the conclusion that Herodotus and Thucydides, though working on very different lines, were both alike creative historians and consummate literary artists. The historical value of their works, each in itself, still more if taken together, is past any easy appraisal. It arises not merely from the continuous story of the sixth and fifth centuries, which their joint narratives supply, but also indirectly, and none the less richly, from the extent to which these authors reflect their own environment, and reveal the mind and moral of their own age. Such reflection, indeed (some one may say), is the conscious mission of Thucydides: true!—But his indirect witness, his collateral implications, his self-betrayal, are that wherein he is most convincing; his expressly memorial and didactic purposes are not his most intriguing merits. With Herodotus the contrast between now and then, past and present, is, of course, everywhere and consciously perceptible. Even his Greek histories start, so to speak, in the previous generation and carry back through the Lyric age of the Despots to the Heroic Age of Homer and the Cyclic Epos; while his non-Hellenic Logoi raise all the immense contrast between the Greeks and the non-Hellenic civilizations and uncivilizations of the Persian age.

A vast world-wisdom is, indeed, stored in the diverse yet equally immortal products of the Ionian and of the Attic Master, there in more varied and happy measure, here in darker, more intense and merciless character. It might seem but barely possible that one and the same nation should within the quarter of a century, or so, which separated the death of Thucydides from the death of Herodotus, exhibit two phases of historic import, so sharply and so cruelly contrasted as the united Hellas of Herodotus, transfigured and glorified by the repulse of the ‘Barbarian' and the Hellas of Thucydides, rent in twain, divided against itself, Ionian against Dorian, oligarch versus democrat, even democrat versus democrat, Sparta and Athens, Athens and Syracuse at ‘truceless warfare/ the whilom traitor, Thebes, as tertius gaudens, destined to enjoy a brief hegemony before the utter barbarians of the North and the West should make an end for ever of the parochial politics of the Greek city-states—but not, indeed, an end of the humane and amazing art and letters of the Periclean age. And in this connection Herodotus and Thucydides are mutually indispensable and complementary: the one presenting the age still suffused with the light of the great deliverance, that concrete expression of the unity of Hellas, that proof, once for all, of the dynamic and ethical superiority of European culture: the other depicting, with relentless candour, the fundamental dualism underlying the Hellenic order, its hegemonic rivalries, centri­fugal ambitions, class wars, insular atomism, treacheries, disloyalties and disintegrations. Of a truth, Herodotus and Thucydides, though contemporaries, though perhaps personally acquainted, are in spirit, and in the realm of letters, worlds apart Thucydides, displaying the tragic self-destruction of the premier City-state, his native Athens, whose recent heyday and patriotic service had made the life, the travel, the achievement of Herodotus, Dorian child of subject yet sunny Ionia, possible: Herodotus, whose unexampled work was the noblest tribute ever laid at the feet of the violet-crowned Athens. Yet strange to tell, Thucydides, who all but anticipates Aristotle’s inquest on the polis, apparently shares that philosopher’s belief in the permanent possibility of the city-state, and fails to draw from history, despite his didactic tendency, its one lesson, the relativity, the instability, the impermanence of all human institutions, which the far- wandered Herodotus had expressly alleged as his chief reason for recounting the varying fortunes, and misfortunes, not of Hellas only, but of the greater part of mankind.

The due appreciation of Herodotus and of Thucydides as artists may have suffered sometimes from two contrary misconceptions; the one, regarding Herodotus as a mere child of Nature, creating indeed a great work, but almost in sport, unconscious of design and innocent of forethought: the other, regarding Thucydides as a sheer incarnation of science, or at least of the scientific spirit, and repudiating on his behalf the charge of literary artfulness, as derogatory to his conscience and his achievement. There is some justification for each of these exaggerations in the superficial aspects of the respective works. But we have already seen reason to discount the exaggerated claim advanced for Thucydides as the founder of historical science, and that claim cannot be rehabilitated by robbing him of his superb and tragic powers as a literary artist. So, too, Herodotus cannot be dismissed from the schools of history as a merely naive globe-trotter, with an accidental turn for happy anecdote-mongering. The fundamental test of literary art is the contemplation of the literary work as a whole: and this test the works of Herodotus and Thucydides triumphantly abide, as even the barest synopsis of each work in turn might indicate.

Nor is this triumph to be diminished or discounted by the discovery that in neither case can the whole have been originally conceived and projected as such fully or precisely in the form which it finally received from the Master’s hand, and in which it has fortunately come down to us. But the architectonic retractation of the work of Thucydides was all, so to speak, in pari materia, and did not demand a creative effort comparable to that unification of national and world history accomplished in the work of Herodotus: which accordingly presents a much more difficult problem in regard to origin and composition. Such problems, however, in relation to either or both of the works under review are of too searching and disputable a character for elucidation under the necessary limits of this chapter. Nor is it worth while to dissect the contents with a view to exhibit the bare skeletons of the works in question. But room may still be found here for a brief survey of the sources, on which Herodotus and Thucydides relied for their materials, and for a suggestion, or two, of their respective methods and tendencies, in the exploitation of those materials.

The Quellen-lehre, or doctrine of the ‘Sources,’ is a simpler problem in the case of Thucydides than in the case of Herodotus, partly because of the difference in their themes, partly by reason of a difference in method, to say nothing of personal idiosyncrasy. In his own proper field, the history of twenty-seven years of warfare—twenty of which he has actually recorded—Thucydides was the first pioneer to break ground. He had for this record no literary predecessors or authorities. The extent to which he could have used documentary evidences was relatively small. Copies of official documents, such as treaties, in all cases presumably and in one case demonstrably authentic, occur in his text to the special delight of the modern scholar: but such a document as the Dispatch of Nicias from Sicily in the eighteenth year of the war is probably governed by the same canon as the Speeches, which Thucydides puts into the mouths of various orators, no doubt with due regard to the probabilities of the case, but seldom quite convincingly from the strictly historical point of view. It is vastly otherwise with the narrative of military events, and with the elucidation of the political situation, as it becomes integral to the warfare. Here Thucydides is the master of all those who have written histories of their own times. He was himself a prominent if not a leading personage in the Athenian state, and was one of the ten elected magistrates, or Generals, in control of the War Office at least once, in the eighth year of the war (424—3). His banishment, assuredly in consequence of his failure on service to anticipate Brasidas the Spartan at Amphipolis in that year, gave him twenty years at least of enforced leisure, to be devoted to the further collection of evidence from a wide range of witnesses, and, as he himself avers, from the side of both belligerents, for the purpose of his great literary undertaking. The results of his method, which is to extract for his readers, to all generations, a clear and chronologized narrative, the precise sources of which are seldom even indicated, must be taken or left on his authority, and on his authority alone. In general, posterity has accepted Thucydides at his own valuation. There are supplements to his history in the Inscriptions; in the extant comedies of Aristophanes; in later writers, more especially in Plutarch’s Lives of Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Lysander; last not least in the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens, which in particular calls for some readjustments in the story of the Revolution at Athens in 411 as narrated in the unfinished Eighth Book: but Thucydides will never be dethroned as the sovran authority for the history of the years 433 to 411 b.c. Even for the half ­century previous to the outbreak of the war his narrative ranks hardly less high, though it leaves many more lacunae to be filled in by supplementary evidences, the work of Herodotus included: and we may regret that Thucydides, for his pemmicanned sketch of the Pentecontaetia, has not exploited the archives of the Athenian State more freely. Where he deals with still earlier periods (never on an extensive scale), he may safely be assumed to be using literary sources, the best work of his predecessors, so far as available, Antiochus of Syracuse for the early colonization of Sicily, perhaps the Hellanicus whom he censures, for the Thesean synoecism of Attica, though as a loyal Periclean he appears to have no use for Solon, and little prejudice against Peisistratus.

The conventional fiction, that in relation whether to the politics of his own time or to the history of the past, Thucydides affords a unique example of flawless impartiality, should no longer be necessary to the full appreciation of his work as a thing of everlasting value and reality. For an active politician and place­man, for an historian of his own times, for a Greek, Thucydides may be a miracle of impartiality; but he is not quite impartial. His ludicrous depreciation of the historic importance of the Persian wars; his transparent animosity against Cleon (undoubtedly his leading colleague among the Generals of 424—3); his determination to allow no Haw in the statecraft of Pericles; his testimonials to the authors of the Revolution in 411: all this may not amount to very much, but it amounts to something, and incidentally helps to redeem the historical artist from the fate of the bare annalist. His didactic purpose, the sin which so easily besets him, and with which as artist or as annalist he should have had nothing to do, makes us wonder at times whether it is merely in the Speeches and express reflections, that he has dropped into a paedagogic role: whether any parts of the narrative, the story of the siege of Plataea, for example, or the reign of terror in Corcyra, have been featured for purposes of instruction. His theory, that the years from the Archonship of Pythodorus I (432—1) to that of Pythodorus II (404-3), inclusive, were all years of one continuous war, is a reasoned conviction, but it betrays a bias to magnify his office, and has somewhat the air of a sophistic thesis. The deeper argument carries further. If the warfare from 431 to 404 was all one integral struggle why then the duel between Sparta and Athens began in 461, and dated from the denunciation (by Pericles) of the ‘alliance against the Mede’. On Thucydidean principles the fourteen years of peace, or less, for the Peace was declared at an end in 432 at Sparta, might easily have been given the same character as the seven years Peace 421—14; while the assertion that Athens and Sparta were at the height of their powers in 431 is demonstrably false: Athens at least had been vastly more powerful from 461 to 445 than she was after the Samian war. But the lack of contemporary records for the Pentecontaetia has given the Thucydidean conception of the course of Greek history in the last three quarters of the fifth century b.c. an authority which it is easier for moderns to accept meekly than to challenge, or to challenge than to dethrone.

The most searching criticism hardly detracts from the extraordinary impressiveness of the work of Thucydides: the elements of weakness therein are so clearly defined that the historical residuum is unassailable: we have to deal with a personal equation, and the author himself makes the discount easy for us. Vastly different is the case of Herodotus. Here almost every page, and every story—especially the traditions of the Persian war, but not those only—are saturated with afterthought, prejudice, local and party and personal feeling and interests: and memories of earlier events have been distorted or idealized ‘by lapse of time and men’s love of the marvellous.’ But little or nothing of all this belongs to the author: he is all good nature, the incarnation of sweet reasonableness, only anxious to do justice all round and to everybody, whether Greek or barbarian, bond or free. The mischief all comes of the nature of his sources, and of his deliberate purpose to repeat whatever has been reported, and to allow his hearers, or readers, to select the true or probable, and to reject the contrary, for themselves. Where there is a variant, he will not suppress alternatives, or impose his own judgment upon posterity. Even when his own mind is made up, he will allow his informants, and his public the benefit of the doubt. After all, he is not trying to forewarn and to forearm reactionaries, but to delight and exalt common folk with visions of the derring deeds of men.

In the end this method works out quite as well for historical purposes, especially in relation to his proper undertaking, as the contrary plan of Thucydides: indeed, one shudders on re­flecting what Thucydides might have made of the Herodotean theme! But the method in view is no more quite fully and consistently applied in the composition of the Logoi, or ‘stories,’ than the Thucydidean plan in the composition of the Syngraphe or ‘history’. For Herodotus does sometimes expressly give one of several versions of a story, and suppress the others, as for example one of three rival accounts of the coming of Cyrus; and he does at times definitely take sides, not merely with Greek against barbarian, but with Greek against Greek, as in his famous eulogy of Athens, the saviour of Hellas, or in his attitude towards Corcyra for its neutrality, and the neutral states in Peloponnese for their medism. Moreover, the rather crude philosophy of History, which is perhaps the nearest thing to a religious creed that Herodotus professed, undoubtedly affects his preferences and determines now the turn of a particular story, now the general conception of the course of affairs, whether touching private persons, an Adrastus, a Glaucus, a Hermotimus, or kings and potentates, a Croesus, a Polycrates, a Xerxes, or states and cities, as in the contrast between the power of Persia and the poverty of Greece, exaggerated the better to point a moral.

Yet for the subjects and period in which Herodotus counts as primary authority, the Persian wars, the Achaemenid dynasty, the history of the leading Greek states, and for the general description of the contemporary world his evidence is of immense, though varying, value. We may feel pretty sure that he left no available source of information unexplored. The extent to which his materials are drawn from written and in­scribed documents is a problem on which there has not been complete agreement among scholars, but we may safely say that there is a much larger amount in his work directly or indirectly drawn from such sources than is expressly specified. Even for the story of the Persian invasion he will have had some literary material, mainly poetical, besides the oracles and epitaphs pre­served in his text: though, oddly enough, the leading case in which we can bring this probability into court, by comparison of the account of the battle of Salamis presented by Aeschylus in the Persae with the account preserved by Herodotus, proves the historian only too independent of the poet. Still, Herodotus incidentally shows a wide acquaintance with extant Greek literature, though he is not out, so to speak, to parade his erudition; and lyric, gnomic, and popular poetry is probably behind many details in his history. Certain materials from their very nature will have come to him in writing: oracles, genealogies, army and navy lists, and so forth. The information gathered at great archaeological centres, Delphi, Athens, Olympia, Samos, will not all have been merely oral. The remoter history of the Greek states had been partially reduced to writing by his predecessors: he was not ignorant of their works. There is virtually nothing to prove that he commanded any language but his own, and for his accounts of non-Hellenic history and antiquities he could not himself draw on native inscriptions: the Achaemenid records which have within living memory greatly modified our knowledge of the rise and progress of the Persian power were inaccessible to Herodotus: but his account of that Empire and its organiza­tion must go back, at second or third hand, to such documents and written records. That is all doubly clear, and generally ad­mitted as true, of his Egyptian Logoi, But here, again, pro­bability points to much of the work having been done previously by Greek writers, and accepted by Herodotus at second hand. The crude blunder by which the kings of the fourth dynasty appear in his list after those of the eighteenth and nineteenth, might have come to him ready-made, whatever its accidental or technical explanation may be. The earlier Books of Herodotus, especially the second, have a much closer literary texture than the subsequent Books, notably the last three, and that albeit the second Book represents Herodotus in conversation (through an interpreter, presumably) with Egyptian ‘priests’—or possibly only deacons—as on the occasion which he exploits to the disadvantage of poor Hecataeus! Herodotus may still count as an authority for the history of the Greeks and Persians in Egypt, and even to some extent for the history of Egypt under the twenty-sixth dynasty: but for the older native history modern Egyptology relics more and more exclusively upon the native monuments and records. Generally speaking we must say that the stories in the first three Books of Herodotus are now not so much materials for the true history of the non-Greek and pre-Greek world as materials from which we may reconstruct the Hellenic versions, or perversions, of non-Hellenic history, for the truer version of which the modern world is going to the native records and monuments in middle and hither Asia and in Egypt, which were undecipherable and inaccessible to the Greeks of the fifth century b.c.

A review of the historian’s Sources, at least in the case of writers whose works are largely based on personal experience and oral testimony, gathered soon after the event from eye-witnesses, naturally passes into a biographical inquiry of a kind which writers of works, admittedly compilations from literary and documentary sources, do not invite. For the biographies of Herodotus and Thucydides their own works are certainly the primary sources. External evidences in the case of the elder writer are surprisingly meagre. No separate biography of Herodotus, if we except a short article in Suidas, has come down from Alexandria or Constantinople; but various writers of the Roman and Byzantine period preserve jottings on the circumstances of his life, the dis­cussion of which must not now detain us.

Oddly enough the external tradition makes nothing of Herodotus’ travels, which bulk so largely in his own work, that mine of autobiographical information about the author, for whoso cares to piece together the numerous incidental notes and self­-revelations. The moderns have not been weary of reconstituting the man, his life and movements, his character and methods, from his work, without, however, reaching complete agreement or finality. Some, accepting every presumable indication of autopsis in the text at its face value, extend his travels over the greater part of the Persian empire, including Babylon, over Greece, Upper Egypt, the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and the unconquered and uncolonized hinterlands of the Euxine, though in the West none ventures to carry him beyond the Pillars, or even to Carthage or to Marseilles. Others will be disposed to cancel the remoter stages while verifying his visits to Memphis and the Fayum, to Tyre, to Byzantium and Olbia as no less certain than his presence at one time or another in Samos, Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Delphi, Dodona, Sybaris (Thurii), and of course on the intermediate lines implied in those voyages and journeys. Such a record of private travel is surely unique, at least before the days of the Caesars and the Roman pacification of the civilized world. And everywhere he went Herodotus carried his inexhaustible interest, his insatiable curiosity, his infinite capacity for taking notes: his flair for a good story, his power of sustaining a continuous narrative, his delight in digression, aside, and bon mot'. his certainty of self-recovery, his sense of the whole: the lightness of his touch, the grace of his language, his glory inhuman virtue and achievement wherever to be found: and withal the feeling of mortality, the sense of tears, the pathos of man’s fate: with ever a winged word, a witty, a wise word, as the last word: but throughout all, such a modesty, and reserve of his own merely phenomenal self, that we cannot ascertain whether he was single, or married, or the name of any of his closer friends or relatives, or any of the honours or the hard­ships, that must have fallen to his lot, in his life-adventure in the wide world: not even, for example, if he is drawing on his personal experience, or on that of others, when he tells us that no Egyptian, whether man or woman, would kiss a Greek on the lips.

In life and character Thucydides contrasts with Herodotus no less strongly than in style. No one has ever smiled over a line of Thucydides, and he himself never unbends in his composition: it presents him to us not merely as a serious but as a proudly tragic figure. He was, as he allows us to know, an Athenian, and suffered in the plague, a magistrate, an exile for twenty years after his command ‘at Amphipolis’ (which is just where he was not on the fatal day in 424!). His analysis proves him as competent to diagnose the disease in the City-state, the rottenness in Hellas, as Aristotle afterwards was, but with something less than the Stagirite’s aloofness: Thucydides was before all a politician, a patriot, an Athenian. There is a Dantesque austerity in his tone. His concise and consecutive narrative of military events gives the relative trivialities of old Greek warfare an importance not merely in their results, but in themselves. In his ruthless rationale of actions and events we see him at his greatest. He seems in effect to anticipate Butler’s positivism, so distressing to happy-go-lucky humanity: Things and actions are what they are, and their consequences will be, what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived? He brings to history the conception of politics as a sphere for the application of reason (Nous) though that is not his own favourite word for it: he is content with terms of a lower range. He appears himself as an incarnation of gnomic reason on the level of technical accomplishment: he is an adept of research, dialectic, judgment. His self-confidence is unbounded. He has no misgivings. He is always right. An historical Syngraphe, not an autobiography is what he offers us; his own name hardly appears in his work except in relation to its composition and authorship, of which he seems, perhaps, somewhat jealous: and like Julius Caesar afterwards, in the Commentaries, he writes of himself throughout in the third person.

Just once Thucydides whispers his father’s outlandish name, Olorus: for further biographical details we have to consult the literati of the Roman and Byzantine empires. Much which reappears in the composite Biography and Critique passing under the name of Marcellinus, might be ingenious afterthought not genuine tradition: but Marcellinus proves that a long succession of writers (Zopyrus, Didymus, Cratippus, Timaeus, Antyllus) had concerned themselves with the personal fortunes of Thucydides; items, which are not obviously enlargements of autobiographical hints in his own work, may have some real tradition or archaeological evidence behind them. A second more compressed Biography, anonymous, but from a similar quarter, adds surprising particulars concerning his forensic and financial activities, which may, perhaps, be traceable to some confusion with one or other of his namesakes.

The greater attention bestowed upon the Biography of the Attic, as compared with that of the Ionic, historian corresponds roughly with the subsequent fortunes of their respective works in antiquity. The best, if not the earliest, homage to the Logoi of Herodotus may be seen in the Syngraphe of Thucydides, who owes far more of stimulus and example to his great opposite than he openly avows. Thucydides arrays himself in deliberate opposition and contrast to Herodotus, claims expressly a far greater subject, claims expressly a far sounder method, answers the entertaining sallies and mythopoetic attractions of the great unnamed, and again and again, when he crosses the path of Herodotus, puts him right en passant. The omission of an express mention of Herodotus or his work is indeed, all things considered, a part of the case against Thucydides: for the Athenian public he needed, no more than Aristo­phanes, to name his target: from posterity he deliberately withheld the name, while he carried on the tale. Thucydides begins his review of the interval between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars exactly at the point where Herodotus dropped the baton, that, moreover, being by no means a self-evident point, whether of arrival or departure; so that his record reads continuously with that of Herodotus, only one degree less obviously than the Hellenica of Xenophon with the Peloponnesiaca of Thucydides. None has ever doubted that Xenophon knew his Thucydides, nor need we doubt that Thucydides had his copy of Herodotus. Posterity, indeed, has given the twain a closer association with each other than either might have been willing to acknowledge in life. The Museum at Naples contains a double herm, presenting the busts of Herodotus and Thucydides back to back on a single column. The scarcely idealized portraits are distinct in feature, and contrasted in type, nor are they wanting in a certain verisimilitude: the one marble may be supposed to represent counter­feits of the two historians, which had plausible originals as models. Be that as it may, the juxtaposition of the twin founders of European historiography, on the same level, with opposite outlooks, was a happy thought of the synthetic sculptor, some justification for which has, perhaps, been established in the foregoing all too brief appreciation of a noble pair of immortals:— the swan song of a Phil-Hellenist well stricken in years.

CHAPTER XV