Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/158

 hands and was put to death. Herodotus fled to Samos. At last, in what way we know not, Lygdamis fell and Herodotus returned; but the party in power was for some reason hostile to him-possibly they were 'autonomists' while he stood for the Athenian League-and Herodotus entered upon his life of wandering. He found a second home in Athens, where he had a friend in Sophocles, and probably in Pericles and Lampon. He was finally provided for by a grant of citizenship in Thurii, the model international colony which Athens founded in South Italy, in 443, on the site of the twice-ruined Sybaris. Of his later life and travels we know little definite. He travelled in Egypt as far as Elephantine at some time when the country was in the hands of Persia, and of course when Persia was at peace with Athens-after 447, that is. He had then already finished his great Asiatic journey (ii.150) past Babylon to the neighbourhoods of Susa and Ecbatana. At some time he made a journey in the Black Sea to the mouths of the Ister, the Crimea, and the land of the Colchians. Pericles went through the Black Sea with a large fleet in 444; perhaps Herodotus had been employed beforehand to examine the resources of the region. Besides this, he went by ship to Tyre, and seems to have travelled down the Syrian coast to the boundary of Egypt. He went to Cyrene and saw something of Libya. He knew the coast of Thrace, and traversed Greece itself in all directions, seeing Dodona, Acarnania, Delphi, Thebes, and Athens, and, in the Peloponnese, Tegea, Sparta and Olympia. What was the object of all this travelling; and how was a man who had lost his country, and presumably could not draw on his estate, able to pay for it? It is a [135]