Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 10.djvu/26

HEBOCIANUS. 14 HERODOTUS. berg, 1848) ; Hilgard, Excerpla ex Libris Bero- ditiiii ( I.eipzijr, 1SS7); and Stephen, Oe Hero- diuiii Ttrhnki Uiakctoloyia (Strassburg, 1889). HEBO'DIAS. Daii;,'hter of Aristol.ii'.'.is (sn- ond son (if llernd the Ureal and Marianine, grand- (buiglilcr of llyrcanus) and IJernui', daughter of Salome, Herod's sister. She was twice mar- ried, first to her half-uncle, Herod, called in the (.Jospels I'hilip (Mark vi. 17; Matt. .iv. 3), the issue of which marriage was .1 daughter, Salome, who afterwards liocame the wife of Philip, another half-uncle of lier umtlicr. Doubt- less, through the real attachment of love, Herodias left her husband for his half-brothcT, Antipas — a marriage which. because of its il- legjility according to the Mosaic law. brought upon the latter the outspoken denunciation of John the Baptist, and so led to that prophet's im])rison- Dient and final execution (Jlark vi. 17-20; Matt. xiv. 3-12). It was quite jiossibly the daughter of this second marriage, bearing her mother's name, who danccil iH'forc .Xntijias on the occasion of the festival and allured him to the reckless oath that gave Herodias ojiportunitv to accom- l)lish the death of .John. The better reading of Mark vi. 22, "liis daughter Heroiiias," is too plain to be otherwise interpreted : while the term by which she is descril)ed, "a little maid." would scarcely apply to a girl as old as Salome must have been at that time. It was Herodias's am- bition that led her to urge Antipas to his fatal journey to Home for the securing of the royal title, though lier loyal afTection for him made her sh:ire his exile. Sec llEROD. HEBOD'OTUS (l.at., from fJk. 'HpMoTos) (C.4S4-C.424 n.c. ). . CJrcek historian, lie was the son of l.yxes and Khieo or Dryo. and was born about 484 B.C. at Haliearnassus, an origi- nally Doric colony in Southwestern .Asia Minor, at that time ruled by a Queen Artemisia imder the sway of the Persians. His uncle. Panyasis, was an epic poet : and it was ])erbaps through him that Herodotus acquired the comprehensive ac- quaintance with early (Jreck literature, especially poetry, which is so conspicuous in his writings, ilis family was a prominent one. and the uncle was put to deatli about the year 45" for conspir- ing against the tyrant Kygdamis. Herodotus went into exile, and is said to have made his temporary home in the island of Samos, an ally of Athens and member of the. Confederacy of Delos or the Athenian Kmpire. Between the years 4G7 and 464 he is believed to have traveled extensively on the shores of the Black Sea. in Thrace. Scylhia. Asia Jlinor. and the Persian Kmpire, including Egj'pt. The precise extent, direction, and starting-points of his travels are matters of inference from his writings and of controversy among schidars. He saw in Eirv'pt the skulls lying on the field of a bat- tle fovight in 4flO. He visited Sc}-thia before the year 4.54. His travels in Greece, and possibly in Southern Italy, fall much later. Haliearnassus having risen against T.vgdamis and joined the Athenian Empire. Herodotus, according to one tradition a leader in the uprising, returned and resumed his citizenship. He was. however, soon attracted to Athens, then, about 447, at the heiuht of the age of Pericles, the centre and focus of Hellenic ciiltiire. There, or. as a fanci- ful later tradition has it. at Olympia. he gave 'author's readinffs' from his unfinished histories. and won the admiration of the createst minds of Greece, the personal friendship of the poet Sophocles, and, so the story goes, the more substan- tial reward of ten talents voted by the people. A well-invented story relates that the boy Thucyd- idcs, present at one of these readings, burst into tears from stress of eiiuilous emotion, and that the historian complimented the boy's father on this indication of a generous nature. In the year 444 Herodotus, with many other brilliant men, joined the colony which I'ericles was founding at Thurii in Southern Italy. His subsequent life is a blank. It was ])robat)ly devoted to the com- ]iletioii and the final publication of his history. An allusion to the Propylaa. or entrance to the .cropolis, is supposed to prove that he visited -Sthens so late as 430. Nothing in his histories implies that he survived the year 424. Tradi- tion placed his tomb at Thurii. Herodotus was called the father of history by Cicero. This means, if anything, that he was the first to compose an artistic and dramatically unified histori-. although there were historians be- fore him, the so called logographers, or story-tell- ers, who continued in prose the work of the garru- lous later epic. (See LonooRAPiiER. ) Tlie only one explicitly named by Herodotus is Hecatseus of ililetus, who traveled in Eg>pt, is mentioned as a prominent adviser of the lonians during the Ionic revolt, and is thought by some critics to have been the source of much matter that Herodo- tus gives out as his own. But Herodotus was the first to grasj) firmly a great central international theme, and to work up, in due and artistic subor- dination to it. a vast mass of legendary, local, an- tiquarian, geographical, and ethnological lore, derived partly from predecessors, but widely .sup- lilemented by his own triivels and inquiry (the original meaning of hintori/). This theme was the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, of which his boyhood had perhaps caught the last echoes in the tales told by his townsfolk of the wondrous exploits of Artemisia at Salamis. He appre- hended it as the culmination of the eternal con- flict between the East and the West which he conceived as beginning with the Trojan War. and of which we have not yet seen the end. It shaped itself to his imagination in a large, dra- matic, and religiously edifying way. Its prologue is the evolution of the free States of Greece, and, in antithesis to them, the history and panorama of the barbarian world of ancient monarchies and outlying peoples. Its dramatic culmination is the overthrow of the myriads of Xerxes by the few thousand Greeks at Salamis, Platira. and Mycalc. Its moral is the lesson of the nemesis that waits upon Hybris — upon the insolence of those who. drunk with power, forget the limits of mortality. "For Ood abases the mighty ones of earth, and suffers none to think proud thoughts save Him-iclf." There arc many theories (none of them verifiable) of the order of com- position of the difTcrent parts of the history, of the digressions, in which it abovmds. and of the retouches by which its allusions were brought down to date. But in the final result the general design is so clear both to Herodotus and to the reader, that, despite the bewildering prodigality of anecdote, digression, retrospect. an<l descrip- tion, we never lose our sense of a majestic archi- tectural unity, or fail to feel that we are pro- qressinsr steadily toward a predetermined goal. The nine books named after the muses, into which later grammarians aptly divided the work, fall into natural groups of symmetry or antithesis