Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/175

 really directed against all Libya. There is no reason to think that it was. He introduces his Athenian history by saying (i.56) that Croesus looked for an ally among the Greeks, and found that two cities stood out-Sparta, chief of the Dorians; Athens, chief of the Ionians; but that the latter was crushed for the time being under the heel of her tyrant Pisistratus. The tyrant had not crushed Athens; he was probably not then reigning; Athens was a third-rate Ionian state. In framing these transitions and in getting motives for the insertion of anecdotes, as when he gives to Gelon Pericles's famous saying, "The spring is taken out of the year" (vii.162), Herodotus does not expect to be pinned to conclusions. As Plutarch angrily puts it, he cares for accuracy in such points "no more than Hippocleides!" For the rest, his historical faults are the inevitable consequence of his sources-the real untrustworthiness consisting not in error or inaccuracy here and there, much less in any deliberate misrepresentation, but in a deep unconscious romanticising of the past by men's own memories, and the shaping of all history into an exemplification of the workings of a Moral Providence.

To his own aim he is singularly true-that "the real deeds of men shall not be forgotten, nor the wondrous works of Greek and barbarian lose their name." Plutarch-for the treatise On the Malice of Herodotus is surely Plutarch, if anything is-does not quarrel with him merely for the sake of Thebes. To Plutarch the age Herodotus treated is an age of giants, of sages and heroes in full dress, with surprising gifts for apothegm and repartee, and he sees all their deeds in a glow of adoring humility. He hates, he rejects their meaner side; and he cannot bear the tolerant gossiping realism of Hero-