Thucydides and Sophocles, he must have been tempted, like many another foreigner, to make Athens his permanent home. It is to his credit that he did not yield to this temptation. At Athens he must have been a dilettante, an idler, without political rights or duties. As such he would have soon ceased to be respected in a society where literature was not recognized as a separate profession, where a Socrates served in the infantry, a Sophocles commanded fleets, a Thucydides was general of an army, and an Antiphon was for a time at the head of the state. Men were not men according to Greek notions unless they were citizens; and Herodotus, aware of this, probably sharing in the feeling, was anxious, having lost his political status at Halicarnassus, to obtain such status elsewhere. At Athens the franchise, jealously guarded at this period, was not to be attained without great expense and difficulty. Accordingly, in the spring of the following year he sailed from Athens with the colonists who went out to found the colony of Thurii (see Pericles), and became a citizen of the new town.
From this point of his career, when he had reached the age of forty, we lose sight of him almost wholly. He seems to have made but few journeys, one to Crotona, one to Metapontum, and one to Athens (about 430 B.C.) being all that his work indicates.[1] No doubt he was employed mainly, as Pliny testifies, in retouching and elaborating his general history. He may also have composed at Thurii that special work on the history of Assyria to which he twice refers in his first book, and which is quoted by Aristotle. It has been supposed by many that he lived to a great age, and argued that “the never-to-be-mistaken fundamental tone of his performance is the quiet talkativeness of a highly cultivated, tolerant, intelligent, old man” (Dahlmann). But the indications derived from the later touches added to his work, which form the sole evidence on the subject, would rather lead to the conclusion that his life was not very prolonged. There is nothing in the nine books which may not have been written as early as 430 B.C.; there is no touch which, even probably, points to a later date than 424 B.C. As the author was evidently engaged in polishing his work to the last, and even promises touches which he does not give, we may assume that he did not much outlive the date last mentioned, or in other words, that he died at about the age of sixty. The predominant voice of antiquity tells us that he died at Thurii, where his tomb was shown in later ages.
The History.—In estimating the great work of Herodotus, and his genius as its author, it is above all things necessary to conceive aright what that work was intended to be. It has been called “a universal history,” “a history of the wars between the Greeks and the barbarians,” and “a history of the struggle between Greece and Persia.” But these titles are all of them too comprehensive. Herodotus, who omits wholly the histories of Phoenicia, Carthage and Etruria, three of the most important among the states existing in his day, cannot have intended to compose a “universal history,” the very idea of which belongs to a later age. He speaks in places as if his object was to record the wars between the Greeks and the barbarians; but as he omits the Trojan war, in which he fully believes, the expedition of the Teucrians and Mysians against Thrace and Thessaly, the wars connected with the Ionian colonization of Asia Minor and others, it is evident that he does not really aim at embracing in his narrative all the wars between Greeks and barbarians with which he was acquainted. Nor does it even seem to have been his object to give an account of the entire struggle between Greece and Persia. That struggle was not terminated by the battle of Mycale and the capture of Sestos in 479 B.C. It continued for thirty years longer, to the peace of Callias (but see Callias and Cimon). The fact that Herodotus ends his history where he does shows distinctly that his intention was, not to give an account of the entire long contest between the two countries, but to write the history of a particular war—the great Persian war of invasion. His aim was as definite as that of Thucydides, or Schiller, or Napier or any other writer who has made his subject a particular war; only he determined to treat it in a certain way. Every partial history requires an “introduction”; Herodotus, untrammelled by examples, resolved to give his history a magnificent introduction. Thucydides is content with a single introductory book, forming little more than one-eighth of his work; Herodotus has six such books, forming two-thirds of the entire composition.
By this arrangement he is enabled to treat his subject in the grand way, which is so characteristic of him. Making it his main object in his “introduction” to set before his readers the previous history of the two nations who were the actors in the great war, he is able in tracing their history to bring into his narrative some account of almost all the nations of the known world, and has room to expatiate freely upon their geography, antiquities, manners and customs and the like, thus giving his work a “universal” character, and securing for it, without trenching upon unity, that variety, richness and fulness which are a principal charm of the best histories, and of none more than his. In tracing the growth of Persia from a petty subject kingdom to a vast dominant empire, he has occasion to set out the histories of Lydia, Media, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Scythia, Thrace, and to describe the countries and the peoples inhabiting them, their natural productions, climate, geographical position, monuments, &c.; while, in noting the contemporaneous changes in Greece, he is led to tell of the various migrations of the Greek race, their colonies, commerce, progress in the arts, revolutions, internal struggles, wars with one another, legislation, religious tenets and the like. The greatest variety of episodical matter is thus introduced; but the propriety of the occasion and the mode of introduction are such that no complaint can be made; the episodes never entangle, encumber or even unpleasantly interrupt the main narrative.
It has been questioned, both in ancient and in modern times, whether the history of Herodotus possesses the essential requisite of trustworthiness. Several ancient writers accuse him of intentional untruthfulness. Moderns generally acquit him of this charge; but his severer critics still urge that, from the inherent defects of his character, his credulity, his love of effect and his loose and inaccurate habits of thought, he was unfitted for the historian’s office, and has produced a work of but small historical value. Perhaps it may be sufficient to remark that the defects in question certainly exist, and detract to some extent from the authority of the work, more especially of those parts of it which deal with remoter periods, and were taken by Herodotus on trust from his informants, but that they only slightly affect the portions which treat of later times and form the special subject of his history. In confirmation of this view, it may be noted that the authority of Herodotus for the circumstances of the great Persian war, and for all local and other details which come under his immediate notice, is accepted by even the most sceptical of modern historians, and forms the basis of their narratives.
Among the merits of Herodotus as an historian, the most prominent are the diligence with which he collected his materials, the candour and impartiality with which he has placed his facts before the reader, the absence of party bias and undue national vanity, and the breadth of his conception of the historian’s office. On the other hand, he has no claim to rank as a critical historian; he has no conception of the philosophy of history, no insight into the real causes that underlie political changes, no power of penetrating below the surface, or even of grasping the real interconnexion of the events which he describes. He belongs distinctly to the romantic school; his forte is vivid and picturesque description, the lively presentation of scenes and actions, characters and states of society, not the subtle analysis of motives, the power of detecting the undercurrents or the generalizing faculty.
But it is as a writer that the merits of Herodotus are most
- ↑ Opinion is divided as to this visit to Athens after his settlement at Thurii. Stein, Meyer and Busolt hold that much of his work (especially the later books) was composed at Athens soon after 430 B.C. See further Wachsmuth, Rheinisches Museum, lvi. (1901) 215-218. Macan, Herodotus VII.-IX. (Introduction, pp. xlv.-lxvi.), seeks to prove that the last three books were the first part of the Histories to be composed. He is followed in this view by Bury.
