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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