Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/156

 Herodotus, Son of Lyxes of Halicarnassus (484 (?)-425 (?) B.C.)

Herodotus, the father of history (Cic. de Leg. i.I) was an exiled man and a professional story-teller; not of course an 'improvisatore' but the prose correlative of a bard, a narrator of the deeds of real men, and a describer of foreign places. His profession was one which aimed, as Thucydides severely says, more at success in a passing entertainment than at any lasting discovery of truth; its first necessity was to interest an audience. Herodotus must have had this power whenever he opened his lips; but he seems to have risen above his profession, to have advanced from a series of public readings to a great history-perhaps even to more than that. For his work is not only an account of a thrilling struggle, politically very important, and spiritually tremendous; it is also, more perhaps than any other known book, the expression of a whole man, the representation of all the world seen through the medium of one mind and in a particular perspective. The world was at that time very interesting; and the one mind, while strongly individual, was one of the most comprehensive known to human records.