Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/153

 HELLANICUS 129 tained a mention of the battle of Arginusae^ — that is, it was pubhshed shortly after 406 B.C. Hellanicus is younger than Herodotus, older than Thucydides. The date is of interest, because the general method of Hellanicus's work, whatever it may have been in detail, is not that of Hecataeus or Herodorus, or either of our historians, but simply that of a ruder Aristotle. He went straight to the local record, inscriptional or oral : he collected a mass of definite, authorised statements of fact ; forced them into order by a thorough-going system of chronology ; made each local history throw light on the others, and recorded his deductions in a business-like way. Unfortunately the material he was treating was unworthy of his method. The facts he collected were not facts ; and the order he produced was worse than the honest chaos which preceded it. He began, like so many others, by composing Per- sika ;* the fragments seem to be earlier than Herodotus, and are full of ordinary Greek ' Stories.' The middle part of his activity went to a study of the great groups of legends, to what seemed to him the valuable stores of remote history then in danger of passing away. He wrote Aiolika* and Troika;* the local tendencies of his ^olian birthplace close to Troy explain the selection. The ^olian traditions led him inevitably to Thessaly, to the attempt at a record of the descendants of Deucalion {Deucalioueia*). The second richest centre of legends in Greece was Argos, and its traditions were almost inde- pendent of Thessaly. He betook him to Argos, and not only wrote ArgoHka,^ but, what was now demanded by his developing method, published a list of the successive priestesses of Hera at Argos, as the basis of a uniform ^ Schol. Ar. liants, 694, 720.