Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/176

 Yet it is this power of truthfulness in the man, combined with his tragic grasp and his wide sympathy-this way of seeing men's hearts just as they are with all their greatness and their failure, that causes a critic who weighs his every word, to claim that "no other Greek writer has covered so large a world with so full a population of living and immortal men and women as Herodotus," (Macan, lxxiii.) and to place his work opposite Homer's, "irremovably and irreplaceably" at the fountain-head of European prose literature.