Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/152

 128 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE haps part of Herodorus's method to state the common story before criticising it, for we find him quoted, like Hecat.xus, as an authority for some of the absurdest legends, which almost certainly he must have explained away. He was not an unimagmative sceptic, however : he went so far as to believe the well-authenticated tradi- tion that the Nemean Lion fell from the moon. This was because he believed that the moon was not a small light, but ' another earth ' ; that meteorites and the like pro- bably fell from it ; that certam insects, and, more notably, vultures, whose nests, as far as he could discover, had never been seen on earth, were likely to have flown down from there ; he perhaps added that the lion cannot pos- sibly have been born in Nemea, and cannot well have travelled there from Mount H?emus ; that, moreover, the description of it does not tally with that of any known lion. This is not ' simple credulity ' : given that he underrated the distance of the moon from us, it is a very excusable error in rationalism. He tried hard to systematise his chronology — that gigantic labour which no Greek Heracles ever quite accomplished ; his geo- graphical studies were wide and careful,^ and all he did was subservient to a criticism of early history. How different it is, though not in kind inferior, to the spirit of Herodotus and Thucydides ! THE EARLY 'HISTORIKOI' Hellanicus Hellanicus of Lesbos is so far fixed in date, that his Atthis* IS mentioned by Ihucydides (i. 97), and con- ^ Frag. 20, 46.