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HISTORY] careful to distinguish between the invasion of Xerxes and all that is earlier. Herodotus’s work was published soon after 430, i.e. about half a century after the invasion. Much of his information was gathered in the course of the preceding twenty years. Although his evidence is not that of an eye-witness, he had had opportunities of meeting those who had themselves played a part in the war, on one side or the other (e.g. Thersander of Orchomenos, ix. 16). In any case, we are dealing with a tradition which is little more than a generation old, and the events to which the tradition relates, the incidents of the struggle against Xerxes, were of a nature to impress themselves indelibly upon the minds of contemporaries. Where, on the other hand, he is treating of the period anterior to the invasion of Xerxes, he is dependent upon a tradition which is never less than two generations old, and is sometimes centuries old. His informants were, at best, the sons or grandsons of the actors in the wars (e.g. Archias the Spartan, iii. 55). Moreover, the invasion of Xerxes, entailing, as it did, the destruction of cities and sanctuaries, especially of Athens and its temples, marks a dividing line in Greek history. It was not merely that evidence perished and records were destroyed. What in reference to tradition is even more important, a new consciousness of power was awakened, new interests were aroused, and new questions and problems came to the front. The former things had passed away; all things were become new. A generation that is occupied with making history on a great scale is not likely to busy itself with the history of the past. Consequently, the earlier traditions became faint and obscured, and the history difficult to reconstruct. As we trace back the conflict between Greece and Persia to its beginnings and antecedents, we are conscious that the tradition becomes less trustworthy as we pass back from one stage to another. The tradition of the expedition of Datis and Artaphernes is less credible in its details than that of the expedition of Xerxes, but it is at once fuller and more credible than the tradition of the Ionian revolt. When we get back to the Scythian expedition, we can discover but few grains of historical truth.

Much recent criticism of Herodotus has been directed against his veracity as a traveller. With this we are not here concerned. The criticism of him as an historian begins with Thucydides. Among the references of the latter writer to his predecessor are the following passages: i. 21; i. 22 ad fin.; i. 20 ad fin. (cf. Herod. ix. 53, and vi. 57 ad fin.); iii. 62 § 4 (cf. Herod. ix. 87); ii. 2 §§ 1 and 3 (cf. Herod. vii. 233); ii. 8 § 3 (cf. Herod. vi. 98). Perhaps the two clearest examples of this criticism are to be found in Thucydides’ correction of Herodotus’s account of the Cylonian conspiracy (Thuc. i. 126, cf. Herod. v. 71) and in his appreciation of the character of Themistocles—a veiled protest against the slanderous tales accepted by Herodotus (i. 138). In Plutarch’s tract “On the Malignity of Herodotus” there is much that is suggestive, although his general standpoint, viz. that Herodotus was in duty bound to suppress all that was discreditable to the valour or patriotism of the Greeks, is not that of the modern critic. It must be conceded to Plutarch that he makes good his charge of bias in Herodotus’s attitude towards certain of the Greek states. The question, however, may fairly be asked, how far this bias is personal to the author, or how far it is due to the character of the sources from which his information was derived. He cannot, indeed, altogether be acquitted of personal bias. His work is, to some extent, intended as an apologia for the Athenian empire. In answer to the charge that Athens was guilty of robbing other Greek states of their freedom, Herodotus seeks to show, firstly, that it was to Athens that the Greek world, as a whole, owed its freedom from Persia, and secondly, that the subjects of Athens, the Ionian Greeks, were unworthy to be free. This leads him to be unjust both to the services of Sparta and to the qualities of the Ionian race. For his estimate of the debt due to Athens see vii. 139. For bias against the Ionians see especially iv. 142 (cf. Thuc. vi. 77); cf. also i. 143 and 146, vi. 12-14 (Ladë), vi. 112 ad fin. A striking example of his prejudice in favour of Athens is furnished by vi. 91. At a moment when Greece rang with the crime of Athens in expelling the Aeginetans from their Island, he ventures to trace in their expulsion the vengeance of heaven for an act of sacrilege nearly sixty years earlier (see ). As a rule, however, the bias apparent in his narrative is due to the sources from which it is derived. Writing at Athens, in the first years of the Peloponnesian War, he can hardly help seeing the past through an Athenian medium. It was inevitable that much of what he heard should come to him from Athenian informants, and should be coloured by Athenian prejudices. We may thus explain the leniency which he shows towards Argos and Thessaly, the old allies of Athens, in marked contrast to his treatment of Thebes, Corinth and Aegina, her deadliest foes. For Argos cf. vii. 152; Thessaly, vii. 172-174; Thebes, vii. 132, vii. 233, ix. 87; Corinth (especially the Corinthian general Adeimantus, whose son Aristeus was the most active enemy of Athens at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War), vii. 5, vii. 21, viii. 29 and 61, vii. 94; Aegina, ix. 78-80 and 85. In his intimacy with members of the great Alcmaeonid house we probably have the explanation of his depreciation of the services of Themistocles, as well as of his defence of the family from the charges brought against it in connexion with Cylon and with the incident of the shield shown on Pentelicus at the time of Marathon (v. 71, vi. 121-124). His failure to do justice to the Cypselid tyrants of Corinth (v. 92), and to the Spartan king Cleomenes, is to be accounted for by the nature of his sources—in the former case, the tradition of the Corinthian oligarchy; in the latter, accounts, partly derived from the family of the exiled king Demaratus and partly representative of the view of the ephorate. Much of the earlier history is cast in a religious mould, e.g. the story of the Mermnad kings of Lydia in book i., or of the fortunes of the colony of Cyrene (iv. 145-167). In such cases we cannot fail to recognize the influence of the Delphic priesthood. Grote has pointed out that the moralizing tendency observable in Herodotus is partly to be explained by the fact that much of his information was gathered from priests and at temples, and that it was given in explanation of votive offerings, or of the fulfilment of oracles. Hence the determination of the sources of his narrative has become one of the principal tasks of Herodotean criticism. In addition to the current tradition of Athens, the family tradition of the Alcmaeonidae, and the stories to be heard at Delphi and other sanctuaries, there may be indicated the Spartan tradition, in the form in which it existed in the middle of the 5th century; that of his native Halicarnassus, to which is due the prominence of its queen Artemisia; the traditions of the Ionian cities, especially of Samos and Miletus (important both for the history of the Mermnadae and for the Ionian Revolt); and those current in Sicily and Magna Graecia, which were learned during his residence at Thurii (Sybaris and Croton, v. 44, 45; Syracuse and Gela, vii. 153-167). Among his more special sources we can point to the descendants of Demaratus, who still held, at the beginning of the 4th century, the principality in the Troad which had been granted to their ancestor by Darius (Xen. Hell. iii. i. 6), and to the family of the Persian general Artabazus, in which the satrapy of Dascylium (Phrygia) was hereditary in the 5th century. His use of written material is more difficult to determine. It is generally agreed that the list of Persian satrapies, with their respective assessments of tribute (iii. 89-97), the description of the royal road from Sardis to Susa (v. 52-54), and of the march of Xerxes, together with the list of the contingents that took part in the expedition (vii. 26-131), are all derived from documentary and authoritative sources. From previous writers (e.g. Dionysius of Miletus, Hecataeus, Charon of Lampsacus and Xanthus the Lydian) it is probable that he has borrowed little, though the fragments are too scanty to permit of adequate comparison. His references to monuments, dedicatory offerings, inscriptions and oracles are frequent.

The chief defects of Herodotus are his failure to o grasp the principles of historical criticism, to understand the nature of military operations, and to appreciate the importance of