Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/30

6 mSTOEY OF GREECE. seventh book of Herodotus reminds us in many points of the second book of the Iliad : probably too, if the lost Grecian epica had reached us, we should trace many other cases in which the imagination of the historian has unconsciously assimilated itself to them. The dream sent by the gods to frighten Xerxes, when about to recede from his project, — as well as the ample cata- logue of nations and eminent individuals embodied in the Persian host, — have both of them marked parallels in the Hiad : and Herodotus seems to delight in representing to himself the enter- prise against Greece as an antithesis to that of the Atreidae against Troy. He enters into the internal feelings of Xerxes with as much familiarity as Homer into those of Agamemnon, and introduces " the counsel of Zeus " as not less direct, special, and overruling, than it appears in the Iliad and Odyssey :i though the godhead in Herodotus, compared with Homer, tends to be- come neuter instead of masculine or feminine, and retains only the jealous instincts of a ruler, apart from the appetites, lusts, and caprices of a man : acting, moreover, chiefly as a centralized, or at least as a homogeneous, force, in place of the discordant severalty of agents conspicuous in the Homeric theology. The religious idea, so often presented elsewhere in Herodotus, — that the godhead was jealous and hostile to excessive good fortune or im- moderate desires in man, — is worked into his history of Xerxes as the ever-present moral and as the main cause of its disgrace- ful termination : for we shall discover as we proceed, that the historian, with that honorable frankness which Plutarch calls his " malignity," neither ascribes to his countrymen credit greater than they deserve for personal valor, nor seeks to veil the many chances of defeat which their mismanagement laid open.2 ' Homer, Iliad, i, 3. Atof 6' k-EXeieTo (3ov'Ar]. Herodotus is charac- teiized as'Ofifipov ^TjXuTr/g — 'O/nrjpiKUTarog (Dionys. Halic. ad Cn. Pom- peium. p. 772, Reiske; Longinus De Sublim. p. 86, ed Pearce). - While Plutarch — if indeed the treatise De Hcrodoti Malignitate be the work of Plutarch — treats Herodotus as uncandid, malicious, comipt, the calumniator of great men and glorious deeds, — Dionysius of Halikamassus, on the contrary, with more reason, treats hira as a pattern of excellent dispositions in an historian, contrasting him in this respect with Thucydi- des, to whom he imputes an unfriendly spirit in criticizing Athens, arising from his long banishment : 'H uiv 'HpoSorov Sia^eaic h> anaatv inieiK^g, Kal roli fiiv uya^olc avvrnhfievi], Tolg 6s KOKoTg avvaXyovaa • ij 61 Qovkv61-