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 I20 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE they were attached to historical names Hke the anecdotes of Herodotus ; and as a matter of fact the earHest frag- ment of Greek prose romance known/ has for its hero and heroine Ninus and Semiramis. Chronicles For literature in the narrower sense, the first important prose histories are the chronicles (wpoi) of Ionian towns, followed closely by those of Sicily. No set of 'Horoi' is extant, unless one may regard the Parian Marble as an attempted abbreviation of the ' Horoi ' of all Hellas. It still remains for the student of antiquity to make out what data in our tradition go back to the ancient annals of particular towns. Some local genealogies — many, for instance, in the Scholia to Apollonius — clearly do so ; so does that meteoric stone which fell at Aigospotamoi in the seventy-eighth Olympiad ; and so does that " white swallow no smaller than a partridge" whose appearance in Samos has such a cloud of witnesses.^ A Syracusan chronicle seems to be the source of the record which Thucydides (vi. 1-5) gives of the foundations of the Italian and Sicilian towns ; they are dated by the foun- dation of Syracuse, which is taken as the great era of the world not needing closer specification. The origin of any given chronicle is of course lost in obscurity. Like the epos in early times, like even the histories and com- mentaries and the philosophical text-books of the various schools in later antiquity, like the cathedrals of the Middle ^ Hermes, xxvii. i6i ff. ^ The stone is given in the Parian Marble ; the swallow's witnesses are Aristotle (fr. 531), Antigonus Carystius, Heraclides Ponticus, and ^lian quoting Alexander Myndius.