Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/157



133

Herodotus's whole method is highly subjective. He is too sympathetic to be consistently critical, or to remain cold towards the earnest superstitions of people about him: he shares from the outset their tendency to read the activity of a moral God in all the moving events of history. He is sanguine, sensitive, a lover of human nature, interested in details if they are vital to his story, oblivious of them if they are only facts and figures; he catches quickly the atmosphere of the society he moves in, and falls readily under the spell of great human influences, the solid impersonal Egyptian hierarchy or the dazzling circle of great individuals at Athens; yet all the time shrewd, cool, gentle in judgment, deeply and unconsciously convinced of the weakness of human nature, the flaws of its heroism and the excusableness of its apparent villainy. His book bears for god and ill the stamp of this character and this profession.

He was a native of Halicarnassus, in the far south of Asia Minor, a mixed state, where a Dorian strain had first overlaid the native Carian, and then itself yielded to the higher culture of Ionian neighbours, while all alike were subjects of Persia: a good nursery for a historian who was to be remarkable for his freedom from prejudices of race. He was born about 484 B.C. amid the echoes of the great conflict. Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus, fought for Xerxes at Salamis, and her grandson Lygdamis still held the place as tyrant under Artaxerxes after 460. Herodotus's first years of manhood were spent in fighting under the lead of his relative, the poet and prophet Panyasis, to free his city from the tyrant and the Persian alike. He never mentions these wars in his book, but they must have marked his character somewhat. Panyasis fell into the tyrant's [134]