where the tradition was rich, there were written vrrofiv^-
fxara (' memoirs ') of the stories which the servants of the
god wished to preserve. And, of course, outside and
beyond the official temple-worship, there was the private
and unauthorised preacher and prophet, the holder of
mysteries, the seller of oracles, the remitter of sins — men
like Onomacritus, Tisamenus the I amid, Lampon, and the
various Bakides, whose misty and romantic stories can
frequently be traced in Herodotus. And there were also
the noble families. Their bare genealogies were often in
verse, in a form suitable for quoting, and easily remem-
bered among the public. But even in the genealogies
other branches of the same stock were apt to have con-
tradictory versions ; and when it came to lives and deeds,
which might be forgotten or misrepresented, the family
did well to keep authentic records, suitably controlled, in
its own hands.



FICTION IN EARLY PROSE 119



' Story '

And here we meet the other tendency which goes to
the forming of prose history, the old Lust zum Fabuliren,
taking the form of interest in individuals and a wish to
know their characters and their stories. The Story is a
younger and lesser sister of the Saga, in some lights not
to be distinguished from her. It is impossible to read
our accounts of Solon, Croesus, Demokedes, Polycrates,
Amasis, without feeling that we are in the realm of
imaginative fiction. We are nearer to fact than in the
epos ; and the fact behind is more a human fact. The
characters are not gods or heroes, they are adventurous
prophets and sages and discrowned kings ; the original
speaker is not the Muse, but the Ionian travellei*. It
may even be supposed that there is a certain truth in the
characters, if in nothing else. But that is further than
we have a right to go ; Sir John Falstaff is not psycho-
logically true to Oldcastle the Lollard; there is no reason
to suppose that the low comedian Amasis resembles any
Egyptian Aahmes, or to credit the mellow wisdom of our
Croesus to the real conqueror of Ionia. Once created,
it is true, the character generally stays ; but that is the
case even with the men of the epos.

The story was early fixed as literature. The famous
Milesian and Sybarite stones must date from the sixth
century B.C., before Sybaris was destroyed and Miletus
ruined. Such instances as have been preserved in late
tradition — 'The Widow of Ephesus' in Petronius, and
large parts of Appuleius — are pure fiction, tales in the
tone of Boccaccio, with imaginary characters. But
everything points to the belief that in their first form



I20 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

they were attached to historical names Hke the anecdotes
of Herodotus ; and as a matter of fact the earHest frag-
ment of Greek prose romance known/ has for its hero
and heroine Ninus and Semiramis.



Chronicles

For literature in the narrower sense, the first important
prose histories are the chronicles (wpoi) of Ionian towns,
followed closely by those of Sicily. No set of 'Horoi'
is extant, unless one may regard the Parian Marble as
an attempted abbreviation of the ' Horoi ' of all Hellas.
It still remains for the student of antiquity to make out
what data in our tradition go back to the ancient annals
of particular towns. Some local genealogies — many, for
instance, in the Scholia to Apollonius — clearly do so ; so
does that meteoric stone which fell at Aigospotamoi in
the seventy-eighth Olympiad ; and so does that " white
swallow no smaller than a partridge" whose appearance
in Samos has such a cloud of witnesses.^ A Syracusan
chronicle seems to be the source of the record which
Thucydides (vi. 1-5) gives of the foundations of the
Italian and Sicilian towns ; they are dated by the foun-
dation of Syracuse, which is taken as the great era of the
world not needing closer specification. The origin of
any given chronicle is of course lost in obscurity. Like
the epos in early times, like even the histories and com-
mentaries and the philosophical text-books of the various
schools in later antiquity, like the cathedrals of the Middle

^ Hermes, xxvii. i6i ff.

^ The stone is given in the Parian Marble ; the swallow's witnesses are
Aristotle (fr. 531), Antigonus Carystius, Heraclides Ponticus, and ^lian
quoting Alexander Myndius.



THE LEGENDARY CHRONICLERS 121

Ages, the chronicles were continued and altered and ex-
panded under a succession of editors.

The names of the earliest chroniclers have a mythical
ring. The Chronicle of Corinth was written by ' Eume-
lus' himself, the Corinthian Homer; the Ephesian by
' Kreoph^lus,' the Cretan by ' Epimenides.' That of
Miletus, commonly acknowledged to be the oldest of
all, was the first thing written by Cadmus, when
he had invented letters! He is called 'Cadmus of
Miletus,' though by birth a Phoenician, just as the
Argive chronicler is called 'AcusilAus of Argos,' though
a native, like Hesiod, of a little village in Boeotia. His
chronicle is said to have consisted of Hesiod turned into
prose and 'corrected.' But even Acusilaus {^ Hearken-
people') is not misty enough to be its real author; he
only transcribed it from the bronze tablets which his
father found buried in the earth ! The Chronicle of
Athens, afterwards worked up by many able men such
as Cleidemos, Androtion, Philochorus, has left no tradi-
tion of its origin. A certain Melesagoras, who knows
why no crow has ever been seen on the Acropolis,
seems to represent the sacred Chronicle of Eleusis, and
thus in part that of Athens. There are many impor-
tant fragments quoted from ' Pherekydes ' : Suidas dis-
tinguishes three of the name, from Syros, Leros, and
Athens, respectively ; modern scholars generally allow
two only — a seventh-century philosopher from Syros,
and a fifth-century Athenian historian born in Leros ;
while a critical study of the evidence will probably
reduce the list to one — whose chronicle began with
the origin of the gods and contained the 'words of
Orpheus ' — a half-mythical ' Bring-renown ' parallel to
^ Hearken-pcople' of Argos.



122 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

The first real chroniclers come from Ionia and the
islands, thoughtful and learned men, who put into books
both the records and the oral tradition — BiON of
Proconnesus, who worked over Cadmus ; DiONYSius of
Miletus, perhaps the first who tempered the records
of his unheroic Ionia with the great deeds of Persia ;
Charon of Lampsacus, whose work must have been
something like that of Herodotus, taking in Persian
and Ethiopian history, details in Themistocles's life, and
voyages beyond the pillars of Heracles ; EUG.EON of
Samos, Xanthus of Lydia, and many others leading up
to the great triad, Hecata3us, Herodotus, Hellanicus.

In the West it is a different story. A rich and tragic
history w^as there, and a great imaginative literature ; but
the two did not meet. There were no writers of history
till after the time when the aged Herodotus went over to
finish his days in Thurii. Then Antiochus of Syracuse
published a record of the West reaching at least as far
down as the year 424 B.C. The problematic HiPPYS of
Rhegion may have written at the same time. The
Westerns had, no doubt, their temple records, and pro-
duced a great group of historians in the generation
after Thucydides. But in the beginning of prose com-
position it is significant that they treated literature
before history. Theagenes of Rhegion (460 B.C.?) is
counted as the first Homeric scholar ; we only know
that he explained something ' allegorically ' and told
about the War of the Giants. Glaucus of Rhegion
wrote 'About Poets,' giving not only names and dates,
but styles and tendencies as well, and stating what
original authors each poet ' admired ' or followed, from
Orpheus onward, who ^^ admired nobody, because at
that time there was nobody!' It is this tendency, this



PROSE IN THE EAST AND WEST 123

interest in pure literature, which explains the rise of
Gorgias.

If we search in Eastern Greece for critics of Homer,
we shall find them only in the chroniclers of the towns
which have special connection with him, like Antid6rus
of Kyme, and Damastes of Sigeum. Nevertheless the
higher prose literature took its rise in the East, in that
search for knowledge in the widest sense, which the
Ionian called laroplrj, and the Athenian apparently
cf)L\.oao(f)La. We are apt to apply to the sixth century the
terminology of the fourth, and to distinguish philosophy
from history. But when Solon the philosopher " went
over much land in search of knowledge," he was doing
exactly the same thing as the historians Herodotus and
Hecataeus. And when this last made a 'Table' of the
world, with its geography and anthropology, he was
in company with the philosophers Anaximander and
Democritus. 'Historic' is inquiry, and ' Philosophia'
is love of knowledge. The two cover to a great extent
the same field — though, on the whole, philosophy aims
more at ultimate truth and less at special facts ; and,
what is more important, philosophy is generally the
work of an organised school with more or less fixed or
similar doctrines — Milesians, Pythagoreans, Eleatics —
while the 'Historikos' is mostly a traveller and reciter
of stories.

A prose book in the sixth century was, except in the
case of a text-book for a philosophic school, the result
of the author's ' Historic' ; it was his ' Logos,' the thing
he had to say. Neither the book itself nor the kind of
literature to which it belonged had any name. The first
sentence served as a kind of title-page. The simplest
form is — ^^ Alkvicson of Croton says this" ' ^^ This is the



124 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

setting forth of the research of Herodotus of Halicarnassus."
In a more specialised ' Historic ' — ^* Antiochus, Xenophanes'
son^ put these things together about Italy " ; or without the
author's name — " This I say about the whole world"
(Democritus) ; " Touching the disease called Holy, thus
it is" (Hippocrates). And what was the man who so
WTote ? He was obviously Xoyoypd(f>o<i, or Xoyoiroio'?, since
he had made a * Logos.' He was probably y€Q)'ypd(f)o<i and
OeoXoyo'i ; presumably (f)L\6ao(f)o'^, and in the eyes of his
admirers a a6(f)o^ dvrjp. If you wished to quote his name-
less and chapterless work you had to use some descrip-
tive phrase. As you referred to the middle part of r as
" Homer in the Foot-washing," so you spoke of " Heca-
taeus in Asia," or " in the parts about Asia " ; " Charon in
the Persian parts" ; "Anaximander about Fixed Stars,"
or "in the Description of the World." Late tradition
often took these references for the titles of separate
works, and made various early authors write books by
the dozen.

The early epos was taken as a fact in itself ; it was
either authorless, or the work of an imaginary and semi-
divine author ; so was the story ; so was the chronicle ;
so, of course, were the beginnings of speculation and
cosmology. In the next stage a book is the work of a cor-
poration ; a guild of poets ; a school of philosophers ;
a sect of votaries ; a board of officials. First ' Homer,'
' ^sop,' * Hesiod, '* Orpheus,' * Cadmus' ; next Homeridae,
Pythagoristas, Orphics, and "^flpot MiXijaltov. The close
bond of the old Greek civic life had to be shattered
before an individual could rise in person and express his
views and feelings in the sacred majesty of a book. In
poetry Archilochus and others had already done it. In
prose the epoch was made by a book of which the open-



RISE OF THE PERSONAL AUTHOR 125

ing words must have rung like a trumpet call in men's
ears : " HecatcBiis of Miletus thus speaks. I write as I deem
true, for the traditions of the Greeks seem to me manifold
and laughable."

'HISTORIE'
Hecat^us

Hecat^us was a man of high rank ; descendant of a god
in the sixteenth generation, he had always been told, till
the priests at Egyptian Thebes confuted him ^ ; a traveller
of a rare type, like his contemporary Skylax, who sailed
down the Indus to the Erythraean Sea, like Eudoxus of
Cyzicus under Ptolemy II., in a certain degree like
Columbus, men whose great daring was the servant of
their greater intellect. He travelled all about the Medi-
terranean coasts, in the Persian Empire, and in Egypt,
perhaps in the Pontus and Libya and Iberia, always
la-Topewv, 'seeking after knowledge.' We know him
chiefly from the criticisms and anecdotes of Herodotus,
who differs from him about the rise of the Nile (ii. 21) and
the existence of the river Oceanus (ii. 23), and states with
reserve his account of the expulsion of the Pelasgians
from Attica (vi. 137), but invests his general story of the
man with a suggestion of greatness.

In the first brewing of the Ionian revolt (v. 36) Miletus
sought its Wise Man's counsel ; not, however, to follow
it. He urged them not to rebel, "telling them all the
nations that Darius ruled and the power of him!' The
Wise Man was cold and spoke above their heads ! Then,
if they must revolt, he urged them to seize at once the

1 Hdt. ii. 143.
10



126 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

treasures of Apollo at Branchid;c — the Persians would
take them if they did not — and to build a fleet that could
command the yEgean. The Wise Man was flecked with
impiety ! Aristagoras and the people preferred their own
way, were routed everywhere, and saw the treasure fall,
sure enough, into the hands of the enemy. One other
counsel he gave when things seemed hopeless, urging
Aristagoras not to fly altogether, but to fortify the island
of Leros, hold the sea, and attempt to win Miletus again.
That is, all the things which Ionia wished she had done,
in looking back upon her bitter history, became in the
story the neglected counsels of her great Hecata3us.
And it was he, too, who mediated with Artaphernes for
the sparing of the conquered towns — that, at least,
successfully.

Hecat^us was not a literary artist like Herodotus : he
was a thinker and worker. His style, according to Her-
mogenes (2nd cent. A.D.), who loved the archaic, was
" pure and clear, and in some ways singularly pleasant " ;
yet, on the whole, the book had '' much less charm than
Herodotus — ever so much, though it was mostly myths
and the like." One must not lay much stress on the last
words ; history, to Hecataeus, lay in the ages which we
have now abandoned as mythical, and, while he rejected
the Greek traditions, he often followed the Egyptian.
But we cannot in the face of his opening words talk of
his 'credulity,' or make him responsible for the legend
that Oineus's bitch gave birth to a vine-stump ^ ; he may
have mentioned the story only to ridicule it. In his geo-
graphical work he was the standard authority for many
centuries ; and though he is not likely to have been
quite consistent in his rationalism, he remains a great

1 Frag. 341.



HECATiEUS: HfiROD^RUS 127

figure both in the history of literature and in the march
of the human mind. Hecataeus represents the spirit of
his age as a whole, the research, the rationalism, the
literary habit. Herodotus is the most typical illustra-
tion of the last of these tendencies ; for the others we
select two of the unpreserved writers, Herodorus and
Hellanicus.

Herodorus

H^R0d6rus of Heraclea, father of the sophist Bryson,
whose dialogues are said to have influenced Plato, is
the typical early rationalist. His work was a critical
history of the earliest records, dealing primarily with
his native town and its founder, Heracles, but touching,
for instance, on the Argonauts and the Pelopidae. His
method is one that has lost its charms for us ; but it
meant hard thinking, and it wrought real service to
humanity. Prometheus, bound, torn by the eagle, and
delivered by Heracles, was really a Scythian chief near
the river called Eagle, which, as is well known, makes
ruinous floods. The inhabitants, thinking (as Hesiod
thought) that floods were a punishment for the sins of
princes, bound, i.e. imprisoned, Prometheus, till Heracles,
who is recorded to have received from Atlas "the pillars
of earth and heaven " — i.e. the foundations of astronomy,
geography, and practical science — engineered the stream
into a proper seaward course. Laomedon, again, was
said to have defrauded Apollo and Poseidon of their
reward after they had built his walls for him. That is
the simplest matter : he took money from their temples
for the building and did not restore it.^ It was per-

1 Frag. 23, 24, 18.



128 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

haps part of Herodorus's method to state the common
story before criticising it, for we find him quoted, like
Hecat.xus, as an authority for some of the absurdest
legends, which almost certainly he must have explained
away. He was not an unimagmative sceptic, however :
he went so far as to believe the well-authenticated tradi-
tion that the Nemean Lion fell from the moon. This was
because he believed that the moon was not a small light,
but ' another earth ' ; that meteorites and the like pro-
bably fell from it ; that certam insects, and, more notably,
vultures, whose nests, as far as he could discover, had
never been seen on earth, were likely to have flown down
from there ; he perhaps added that the lion cannot pos-
sibly have been born in Nemea, and cannot well have
travelled there from Mount H?emus ; that, moreover,
the description of it does not tally with that of any
known lion. This is not ' simple credulity ' : given that
he underrated the distance of the moon from us, it is a
very excusable error in rationalism. He tried hard to
systematise his chronology — that gigantic labour which
no Greek Heracles ever quite accomplished ; his geo-
graphical studies were wide and careful,^ and all he did
was subservient to a criticism of early history. How
different it is, though not in kind inferior, to the spirit
of Herodotus and Thucydides !

THE EARLY 'HISTORIKOI'

Hellanicus

Hellanicus of Lesbos is so far fixed in date, that his
Atthis* IS mentioned by Ihucydides (i. 97), and con-

^ Frag. 20, 46.



HELLANICUS 129

tained a mention of the battle of Arginusae^ — that is,
it was pubhshed shortly after 406 B.C. Hellanicus is
younger than Herodotus, older than Thucydides. The
date is of interest, because the general method of
Hellanicus's work, whatever it may have been in detail,
is not that of Hecataeus or Herodorus, or either of our
historians, but simply that of a ruder Aristotle. He
went straight to the local record, inscriptional or oral :
he collected a mass of definite, authorised statements of
fact ; forced them into order by a thorough-going system
of chronology ; made each local history throw light on
the others, and recorded his deductions in a business-like
way. Unfortunately the material he was treating was
unworthy of his method. The facts he collected were
not facts ; and the order he produced was worse than the
honest chaos which preceded it.

He began, like so many others, by composing Per-
sika ;* the fragments seem to be earlier than Herodotus,
and are full of ordinary Greek ' Stories.' The middle
part of his activity went to a study of the great groups
of legends, to what seemed to him the valuable stores of
remote history then in danger of passing away. He
wrote Aiolika* and Troika;* the local tendencies of
his ^olian birthplace close to Troy explain the selection.
The ^olian traditions led him inevitably to Thessaly, to
the attempt at a record of the descendants of Deucalion
{Deucalioueia*). The second richest centre of legends in
Greece was Argos, and its traditions were almost inde-
pendent of Thessaly. He betook him to Argos, and not
only wrote ArgoHka,^ but, what was now demanded by
his developing method, published a list of the successive
priestesses of Hera at Argos, as the basis of a uniform

^ Schol. Ar. liants, 694, 720.



130 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

system of chronology for all the history of the past. It
is perhaps through Hellanicus that Thucydides uses this
record/ though it was recognised in the Peloponnese
before. Meantime, it would seem, the sophist Hippias
had issued his epoch-making list of the Olympiads with
their successive victors. Hellanicus followed him with
a list of the victors in the games of Apollo Karneios at
Sparta.

Hellanicus had now written a number of separate
books. Unlike Herodotus, he gave his various sources
undisguised, and did not attempt to mould them all into
a personal 'Logos' of his own. He seems even to have
given the books names — ' Phoronis,' * as the Argive history
was called, after the ancient king Phoroneus, is a title
pure and simple ; and ' Deucalidneia,' * half-way between
a description and a title. It was after this, to all appear-
ance, that he came to Athens and wrote his celebrated
Atthis* (ArTLKr) avyypa^t]). The Athenians of the past
generations had been too busy making history to be able
to write it. The foreign savant did it for them. It is un-
fortunate that his interests were more in the past than the
present. He began with Ogygos, who was king a thou-
sand and twenty years before the first Olympiad, and
ran mercilessly through all the generations of empty
names requisite to fill in the gaping centuries. He had
started from the Argive list, which was very full ; and he
had to extend the meagre Attic list of kings by supposing
duplicates of the same name. When he comes to the
times that we most wish to know about — the fifty years
after the Persian War — the method which he had
laboriously built up for the treatment of legend, leaves
him helpless in dealing with concrete fact. " Short, and

1 ii. 2 ; iv. 133.



HELLANlCUS 131

in his treatment of dates inexact," is the judgment passed
upon him by Thucydides. But dates were the man's
great glory ! He reckoned by generations, three to a cen-
tury, in the earhest times, by the annual archons as soon
as they were established. Thucydides, in all probability,
means that the system of putting the events down in a
lump against the archon's name, was inexact compared
with his own division of succeeding summers and winters.
Hellanicus was a widely-read and influential author, but
he gets rough handling from his critics : Ephorus " puts
him in the hrst rank of liars." ^ Apollodorus says, " He
shows the greatest carelessness in almost every treatise " ;
Strabo himself " would sooner believe Homer, Hesiod,
and the tragedians." This last statement seems only to
mean that the general tradition embodied in the poets is
safer than the local tradition followed by Hellanicus.
He was an able, systematic, conscientious historian,
though it might possibly have been better for history
had he never existed.

1 iv Toi! 7r\ei(TT0is \{/evd6fievov. QC Josephus c. Ap. i. 3 ; Strabo, x. 451, and
xiii. 612.



VI

HERODOTUS

Herodotus, son of Lyxes of Halicarnassus

(484(?)-425(?)B.c.)

Herodotus, the father of history,^ was an exiled man
and a professional story-teller ; not of course an * impro-
visatore,' but the prose correlative of a bard, a narrator
of the deeds of real men, and a describer of foreign
places. His profession was one which aimed, as Thucy-
dides severely says, more at success in a passing enter-
tainment than at any lasting discovery of truth ; its first
necessity was to interest an audience. Herodotus must
have had this power whenever he opened his lips ; but
he seems to have risen above his profession, to have
advanced from a series of public readings to a great
history — perhaps even to more than that. For his work
is not only an account of a thrilling struggle, politically
very important, and spiritually tremendous ; it is also,
more perhaps than any other known book, the expression
of a whole man, the representation of all the world seen
through the medium of one mind and in a particular
perspective. The world was at that time very interesting ;
and the one mind, while strongly individual, was one of
the most comprehensive known to human records.

^ Cic. de Leg. i. I.
132



HERODOTUS I33

Herodotus's whole method is highly subjective. He is
too sympathetic to be consistently critical, or to remain
cold towards the earnest superstitions of people about
him : he shares from the outset their tendency to read
the activity of a moral God in all the moving events of
history. He is sanguine, sensitive, a lover of human
nature, interested in details if they are vital to his story,
oblivious of them if they are only facts and figures ; he
catches quickly the atmosphere of the society he moves
in, and falls readily under the spell of great human in-