Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/202

 VIII THUCYDIDES At the time when the old Herodotus was putting the finish to his history in Athens, a new epoch of struggle was opening for Greece and demanding a writer. The world of Herodotus was complete, satisfying. Persia was tamed ; the seas under one law ; freedom and order won — " Equal laws, equal speech, democracy." The culture which, next to freedom, was what Herodotus cared for most, was realised on a very wide scale : he lived in a great city where every citizen could read and write, where everybody was Seii/o? and iA.oVao9. There had never been, not even in the forced atmosphere of tyrants' courts, such a gathering of poets and learned men as there was in this simply-living and hard-working city. There was a new kind of poetry, natural only to this soil, so strangely true and deep and arresting, that it made other poetry seem like words. And the city which had done all this — the fighting, the organising, the imaginative creating alike — was the metropolis of his own Ionia, she whom he could show to be the saviour of Hellas, whom even the Theban had hailed, " shining, violet-crowned City of Song, great Athens^ buhvark of Hellas, walls divined ^ That greeting of Pindar's struck the keynote of the Athenians' own feeling. Again and 1 Find. frag. 76. 178