Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/174

 friend. Amasis and Rhampsinitus are all but pure fairy tales; and two celebrated passages-the speech of the wife of Intaphernes preferring her irreplaceable brother to her replaceable son (iii.119); the immortal Hippocleides winning his bride by his prowess and high birth, losing her by dancing on his head, and remarking, as his feet fly, that it is "all one to Hippocleides!" (vi.126seq.)-these two have been run to ground in Indian literature (Macan's edition, App. xiv.) Solon cannot have met Croesus, because the dates do not fit. He cannot have uttered the great speech Herodotus gives him, for it is made up partly from Argive, partly from Delphic legends, legends which clustered in each case around certain unexplained tombs. The dreams that came to lure Xerxes to his ruin, require more personal affidavits to substantiate them. The debate of the seven Persians on Monarchy, Oligarchy, and Democracy, though Herodotus stakes his reputation upon it, has been too much for almost every believer. Conceivably Maass is right in tracing it to a fictitious dialogue by Protagoras. But it is idle to reject only what is grossly improbably, and accept without evidence all that may possibly be true. The most part of the history of Herodotus is mixed up with pure popular story-making in various degrees; the ancient foreign history almost irrecognisably so, the Greek history before Marathon very deeply, while even the parts later than Marathon are by no means untransfigured. In one way, it is true, Herodotus is guilty of personal, though unconscious, deceptiveness; his transitions, his ways of fitting one block of 'Logoi' into another, are purely stylistic. He gets a transition to his Libyan 'Logoi' by saying (iv.167) that the expedition of Aryandes was