Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 2.djvu/447

HERODOTUS. from the first two of the passages here referred to it is even doubtful whether Herodotus c^led him- self a Thurian or a Halicarnassian. There are lastly some passages in the work itself which must suggest to every unbiassed reader the idea that the author wrote somewhere in the south of Italy. (See, e. g. iv. 15, 99, iii. 131, 137, 138, v. 44. &c. vi. 21, 127). Having thus established the time and place at which Herodotus must have written his work, we shall proceed to examine the preparations he made for it, and which must have occupied a considerable period of his life. The most important part of these preparations consisted in his travels through Greece and foreign countries, for the purpose of making himself acquainted with the world and with man, and his customs and manners. We may safely believe that these preparations occupied the time from his twentieth or twenty-fifth year until he settled at Rhegium. His work, however, is not an account of travels, but the mature fruit of his vast personal experience by land and by sea and of his unwearied inquiries which he made every where. He in fact no where mentions his travels and adventures except for the purpose of establishing the truth of what he says, and he is so free from the ordinary vanity of travellers, that instead of acting a prominent part in his work, he very seldom appears at all in it. Hence it is im- possible for us to give anything like an accurate chronological succession of his travels. The minute account which Larcher has made up, is little more than a fiction, and is devoid of all foundation. In Greece Proper and on the coasts of Asia Minor there is scarcely any place of importance, with which he is not perfectly familiar from his own ob- servation, and where he did not make inquiries respecting this or that particular point ; we may mention more especially the oracular places such as Dodona and Delphi. In manj' places of Greece, such as Samos, Athens, Corinth and Thebes, he seems to have made a rather long stay. The places where the great battles had been fought be- tween the Greeks and barbarians, as Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataeae, were well known to him, and on the whole route which Xerxes and his army took on their march from the Hellespont to Athens, there was probably not a place which he had not seen with his own eyes. He also visited most of the Greek islands, not only in the Aegean, but even those in the west of Greece, such as Zncynthus. As for his travels in foreign countries, we know that he sailed through the Hellespont, the Propontis, and crossed the Euxine in both directions ; with the Palus Maeotis he was but imperfectly acquainted, for he asserts that it is only a little smaller than the Euxine. He further visited Thrace (ii. 103) and Scythia (iv. 76, 81). The interior of Asia Minor, espe- cially Lydia, is well known to him, and so is also Phoenicia. He visited Tyre for the special pur- pose of obtaining information respecting the wor- ship of Heracles ; previous to this he had been in Egypt, for it was in Egypt that his curiosity re- specting Heracles had been excited. What Hero- dotus has done for the history of Egypt, surpasses in importance every thing that was written in an- cient times upon that country, although his account of it forms only an episode in his work. There is no reason for supposing that he made himself ac- quainted with the Egyptian language, which was VOL. 11. HERODOTUS. 433 in fact scarcely necessary on account of the numer- ous Greek settlers in Egypt, as well as on account of that large class of persons who made it their business to act as interpreters between the Egyp- tians and Greeks ; and it appears that Herodotus was accompanied by one of those interpreters. He travelled to the south of Egypt as far as Elephan- tine, everywhere forming connections with the priests, and gathering information upon the early history of the country and its relations to Greece. He saw with his own eyes all the wonders of Egypt, and the accuracy of his observations and descriptions still excites the astonishment of tra- vellers in that country. The time at which he visited Egypt may be determined with tolerable accuracy. He was there shortly after the defeat of Inarus. by the Persian general Megabyzus, which happened in b.c. 456 ; for he saw the battle field still covered with the bones and skulls of the slain (iii. 12.), so that his visit to Egypt may be ascribed to about b. c. 450. From Egypt he ap- pears to have made excursions to the east into Arabia, and to the west into Libya, at least as far as Cyrene, which is well known to him. (ii. 96.) It is not impossible that he may have even visited Carthage, at least he speaks of information which he had received from Carthaginians (iv. 43, 195, 196), though it may be also that he conversed with individual Carthaginians whom he met on his tra- vels. From Egypt he crossed over by sea to Tyre, and visited Palaestine ; that he saw the rivers Euphrates and Tigris and the city of Babylon, is quite certain (i. 178, &c., 193). From thence he seems to have travelled northward, for he saw the town of Ecbatana which reminded him of Athens (i. 98). There can be little doubt that he visited Susa also, but we cannot trace him further into the interior of Asia. His desire to increase his know- ledge by travelling does not appear to have sub- sided even in his old age, for it would seem that during his residence at Thurii he visited several of the Greek settlements in southern Italy and Sicilj', though his knowledge of the west of Europe Avas very limited, for he strangely calls Sardinia the greatest of all islands (i. 170, v. 106, vi. 2). From what he had collected and seen during his travels, Herodotus was led to form his peculiar views about the earth, its form, climates, and in- habitants ; but for discussions on this topic we must refer the reader to some of the works mentioned at the end of this article. Notwithstanding all the wonders and charms of foreign countries, the beau- ties of his own native land and its free institutions appear never to have been eflfaced from his mind. A second source from which Herodotus drew his information was the literature of his country, especially the |ft)etical portion, for prose had not yet been cultivated very extensively. With the poems of Homer and Hesiod he was perfectly familiar, though he attributed less historical im- portance to them than might have been expected. He placed them about 400 years before his own time, and makes the paradoxical assertion, that they had made the theogony of the Greeks, which cannot mean anything else than that those poets, and more especially Hesiod, collected the numerous local traditions about the gods, and arranged them in a certain order and system, which afterwards became established in Greece as national traditions. He was also acquainted with the poetry of Alcaeus^ Sappho, Simonides, Aeschylus, and Pindnj. He