Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/154

 130 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE system of chronology for all the history of the past. It is perhaps through Hellanicus that Thucydides uses this record/ though it was recognised in the Peloponnese before. Meantime, it would seem, the sophist Hippias had issued his epoch-making list of the Olympiads with their successive victors. Hellanicus followed him with a list of the victors in the games of Apollo Karneios at Sparta. Hellanicus had now written a number of separate books. Unlike Herodotus, he gave his various sources undisguised, and did not attempt to mould them all into a personal 'Logos' of his own. He seems even to have given the books names — ' Phoronis,' * as the Argive history was called, after the ancient king Phoroneus, is a title pure and simple ; and ' Deucalidneia,' * half-way between a description and a title. It was after this, to all appear- ance, that he came to Athens and wrote his celebrated Atthis* (ArTLKr) avyypa^t]). The Athenians of the past generations had been too busy making history to be able to write it. The foreign savant did it for them. It is un- fortunate that his interests were more in the past than the present. He began with Ogygos, who was king a thou- sand and twenty years before the first Olympiad, and ran mercilessly through all the generations of empty names requisite to fill in the gaping centuries. He had started from the Argive list, which was very full ; and he had to extend the meagre Attic list of kings by supposing duplicates of the same name. When he comes to the times that we most wish to know about — the fifty years after the Persian War — the method which he had laboriously built up for the treatment of legend, leaves him helpless in dealing with concrete fact. " Short, and 1 ii. 2 ; iv. 133.