he knows nothing more till he comes to Leon and Agasicles, some three centuries later, and bursts into a blaze of anecdote. The non-mythical Spartan tradition only began there. The weakness of his Athenian record, apart from the haze of romance which it has in common with the rest, is due to the bitterness of Athenian feeling at the time when the last books were writing. When we hear how the Corinthians fled at Slamis; how the Thebans were branded on the head with the king's monogram, those are only the reverberations of the storm of 432-1 B.C. Somewhat in the same way an older war of passions has resulted in the condemnation, without defence, of Themistocles. It could not be denied that he had saved Hellas, that he loomed the biggest man of the age in all eyes. But he had at the last fled to Persia! The provocation was forgotten; the stain of the final treason blackened all his country's memory of the man; and Herodotus depends for his story upon the two great houses who had hunted Themistocles to a traitor's end (Busolt, Griech. Geschichte, ii.619.). Partly they, partly the swing of popular indignation, had succeeded in fixing Themistocles in the story as a type of the low-born triumphant trickster. It was for Ephorus to redeem his memory, till Ephorus, too, lost his power to speak.
Besides the oral information which came in some shape or another from records, there was that which was merely oral, more 'alive' than the other, as Plato would say, and consequently tending more towards the mere story. This element is ubiquitous in Herodotus. Some of his history can be recognised as Eastern and Germanic folk-lore. Polycrates throwing his ring into the sea and having it brought back by the fish is an old
