Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/413

 FOURTH-CENTURY HISTORIANS 389 learning was naturally the record of the past. Soon after the death of Thucydides, and before that of Xenophon, the Greek physician Ktesias, who was attached to Artaxerxes, wrote Persian and Indian his- tory and a ' Periplus,' with a view, partly of correcting the errors of Herodotus, partly, it is to be feared, of improving upon his stories. He was more important as a source of romance than as a historian. The Sicilian general Philistus wrote in banishment a history of his own times ; he made Thucydides his model, but is said to have flattered Dionysius II. in the hope of being restored. He was killed in Dion's rising in 357. The characteristic of the historians of the later fourth century is that they are not practical statesmen and soldiers, but professional students. Two disciples of Isocrates stand at the head of the list. Ephorus of Kyme wrote a universal history reaching from the Dorian Migration to the year 340. He was a collector and a critic, not a researcher ; he used previous writers freely and sometimes verbally ; but he rejected the earliest periods as mythical, and corrected his sources by comparing them. Being an Isocratean, he laid great stress both on style and on edification. Polybius says his descriptions of battles are ' simply ridiculous ' ; but Polybius says much the same of all civilians. A large part of Ephorus has been more or less transcribed in the extant history of Diodorus Siculus. The other Isocratean who wrote history was a more interesting man, Theopompus (born 380). He was a Chian, and had the islander's prejudice against the Athenian Empire, while other circumstances prejudiced