Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/147

 PROSE IN THE EAST AND WEST 123 interest in pure literature, which explains the rise of Gorgias. If we search in Eastern Greece for critics of Homer, we shall find them only in the chroniclers of the towns which have special connection with him, like Antid6rus of Kyme, and Damastes of Sigeum. Nevertheless the higher prose literature took its rise in the East, in that search for knowledge in the widest sense, which the Ionian called laroplrj, and the Athenian apparently cf)L.oao(f)La. We are apt to apply to the sixth century the terminology of the fourth, and to distinguish philosophy from history. But when Solon the philosopher " went over much land in search of knowledge," he was doing exactly the same thing as the historians Herodotus and Hecataeus. And when this last made a 'Table' of the world, with its geography and anthropology, he was in company with the philosophers Anaximander and Democritus. 'Historic' is inquiry, and ' Philosophia' is love of knowledge. The two cover to a great extent the same field — though, on the whole, philosophy aims more at ultimate truth and less at special facts ; and, what is more important, philosophy is generally the work of an organised school with more or less fixed or similar doctrines — Milesians, Pythagoreans, Eleatics — while the 'Historikos' is mostly a traveller and reciter of stories. A prose book in the sixth century was, except in the case of a text-book for a philosophic school, the result of the author's ' Historic' ; it was his ' Logos,' the thing he had to say. Neither the book itself nor the kind of literature to which it belonged had any name. The first sentence served as a kind of title-page. The simplest form is — ^^ Alkvicson of Croton says this" ' ^^ This is the