Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/219

EXAMPLES OF PROBABLE CORRUPTION 195 cut themselves with knives rather than admit that the a can possibly be wrong ! ^ In the same way, in i. 51 our text can be checked by a contemporary inscription.- The stone agrees exactly with Thucydides in the names of the first set of generals mentioned ; in the second it gives "Glaukon (Metage)nes and Drakonti(des)." Our text gives " Glaukon, son of Leagros ; Andokides,-son of Leo- goras" — that is, Andokides the orator. Is this a mere mistake of the historian's ? Not necessarily. Suppose the owner of some copy in which there was a blot or a tear was not sure of the form 'Leagros'; " Leogoras," he would reflect, " is a re:il name ; Andokides was son of a Leogoras." Hence enters the uninvited orator and ousts the two real but illegible names. Something of that sort is far more likely than such a mistake on the part of Thucydides. In a passage at the end of Book I. where the narra- tive is easy and the style plain, the scholiast observes that "here the lion laughs." The lion would laugh more often and more pleasantly if we could only see his real expres- sion undistorted by the accidents cf tradition. To return from this inevitable digression, we see easily how Thucydides was naturally in some antagonism to Herodotus's whole method of viewing things. Thucy- dides had no supernatural actors in his narrative. He sees no suggestion — how could he in the wrecked world that lay before him ? — of the working of a Divine Providence, His spirit is positif ; he does not speak of things he knows nothing about. He is a little sardonic about ^ Miiller-Striibing of course thinks the passage an interpolation. Thucy- dides used the decadic system of numerals, not that of the Attic inscriptions, 2 C. I. A. 179.