Another elaboration of the tale, which one would fain believe true, asserts that the youthful Thucydides, listening to the recital of Herodotus, was moved to tears, and fired with the ambition to follow in the footsteps of the great writer. The cold hand of modern scepticism has been laid rudely on this tradition, it being asserted that the date of the birth of Thucydides is too near that of Herodotus to lend authenticity to the story. But, be that as it may, this tale is probably as near the truth as most of the others which we have associated with the name of the father of history.
The work of Herodotus is remarkable, among other things, as being the oldest complete prose composition that has come down to us from classical antiquity. It must not be inferred from this that Herodotus was the first Greek who wrote prose. The fact is far otherwise. The so-called father of prose was, as is well known, preceded by a long line of Greek writers, who composed not merely prose compositions, but compositions on history. The names of many of these men are known, but their works have come down to us only in meagre fragments. As such, however, they serve to prove the wide gap which separated the best of them from their successor Herodotus. Indeed it is doubtless because of the surpassing excellence of the history of Herodotus that his work lived on through the labours of successive copyists, while the works of his predecessors were permitted to disappear through slow decay like the works of so many other and later writers of antiquity.
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.
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.