Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/153

Rh a perhaps unique union of bold fancy, exquisite humour, critical acumen, and lyrical power. His eleven extant comedies may be divided into three group?, according as the licence of political satire becomes more and more restricted. In the Acharnians, Knights, Clouds, Wasps, and Peace (425-421) the poet uses unrestrained freedom. In the Birds, Lysistrata, 2 J hesmophoriazusaj, and Frogs (414-405) a greater reserve may be perceived. Lastly, in the Ecdesiazusce and the PLutus (392-388) personal satire is almost wholly avoided. The same general tendency continued. The so-called &quot;Middle Comedy&quot; (390-320) represents the transition from the Old Comedy, or political s-itire, to satire of a literary or social nature. The &quot; New Comedy&quot; (320-250) resembled the modern &quot; comedy of manners.&quot; These successive periods cannot be sharply or precisely marked off. The change which gradually passed over the comic drama was simply the reflexion of the change which passed over the political and soci.il life of Athens. The Old Comedy, as we see it in the earlier plays of Aristo phanes, was probably the most powerful engine of public criticism that has ever existed in any community. Unspar ing personality was its essence. The comic poet used this recognized right on an occasion at once festive and sacred, in a society where every man of any note was known by name and sight to the rest. The same thousands who heard a policy or a character denounced or lauded in the theatre might be required to pass sentence on it in the popular assembly or in the courts of law.

The development of Greek poetry had been completed before a prose literature had begun to exist. The earliest name in extant Greek prose literature is that of Herodotus ; and, when he wrote, the Attic drama had already passed its prime. There had been, indeed, writers of prose before Herodotus ; but there had not been, in the proper sense of the term, a prose literature. The causes of this compara tively late origin of Greek literary prose are independent of the question as to the time at which the art of writing began to be generally used for literary purposes. Epic poetry exercised for a very long period a sovereign spell over the Greek mind. In it was deposited all that the race possessed of history, theology, philosophy, oratory. Even after an age of reflexion had begun, elegiac poetry, the first offshoot of epic, was, with iambic verse, the vehicle of much which among other races would have been com mitted to prose. The basis of Greek culture was essentially poetical. A political cause worked in the same direction. In the Eastern monarchies the king was the centre of all, and the royal records afforded the elements of history from a remote date. The Greek nation was broken up into small states, each busied with its own affairs and its own men. It was the collision between the Greek and the barbarian world which first provided a national subject for a Greek historian. The work of Herodotus, in its relation to Greek prose, is so far analogous to the Iliad in its relation to Greek poetry, that it is the earliest work of art, and that it bears a Panhellenic stamp.

The sense and the degree in which Herodotus was original may be inferred from what is known of earlier prose-writers. For about a century before Herodotus there had been a series of writers in philosophy, mytho- lgy geography, and history. The earliest, or among the earliest, of the philosophical writers were Phere- cydes of Syros (550 B.C.) and the Ionian Anaximenas and Anaximander. The Ionian writers, especially called logographi, &quot; narrators in prose &quot; (as distinguished from epopoii, makers of verse), were those who compiled the myths, especially in genealogies, or who described foreign countries, their physical features, usages, and traditions. Hecatasus of Miletus (500 B.C.) is the best-known repre sentative of the logograplii in both these branches. Hel- lanicus of Mitylene (450 B.C.), among whose works was a history of Attica, appears to have made a nearer approach to the character of a systematic historian.

Herodotus was born in 484 B.C.; and his history was probably not completed before the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (431 B.C.). His subject is the struggle between Greece and Asia, which he deduces from the legendary rape of the Argive lo by Phoenicians, and traces down to the final victory of the Greeks over the invading host of Xerxes. His literary kinship with the historical or geographical writers who had preceded him is seen mainly in two things. First, though lie draws a line between the mythological and the historical age, he still holds that myths, as such, are worthy to be reported, and that in certain cases it is part of his duty to report them. Secondly, he follows the example of such writers as Hecatseus in describing the natural and social features of countries. He seeks to combine the part of the geographer or intelligent traveller with his proper part as historian. But when we turn from these minor traits to the larger aspects of his work, Herodotus stands forth as an artist whose conception and whose method were his own. His history has an epic unity. Various as are the subor dinate parts, the action narrated is one, great and complete; and the unity is due to this that Herodotus refers all events of human history to the principle of divine Nemesis. If Sophocles had told the story of (Edipus in the CEdipus Tyrannus alone, and had not added to it the (Edipus at Colonus, it would have been comparable to the story of Xerxes as told by Herodotus. Great as an artist, great too in the largeness of his historical conception, Herodotus fails chiefly by lack of insight into political cause and effect, and by a general silence in regard to the history of political institutions. Both his strength and his weakness are seen most clearly when he is contrasted with that other historian who was strictly his contemporary, and who yet seems divided from him by centuries.

Thucydides was only thirteen years younger than Herodotus; but the intellectual space between the men is so great that they seem to belong to different ages. Herodotus is the first artist in historical writing ; Thucydides is the first thinker. Herodotus interweaves two threads of causation human agency, represented by the good or bad qualities of men, and divine agency, represented by the vigilance of the gods on behalf of justice. Thucydides concentrates his attention on the human agency (without, however, denying the other), and strives to trace its exact course. The subject of Thucydides is the Peloponnesian War. In resolving to write its history, he was moved, he says, by these considerations. It was probably the greatest movement which had ever affected Hellas collectively. It was possible for him as a contenv porary to record it with approximate accuracy. And this record was likely to have a general value, over and above its particular interest as a record, seeing that the political future was likely to resemble the political past. This is what Thucydides means when he calls his work &quot;a possession for ever.&quot; The speeches which he ascribes to the persons of the history are, as regards form, his own essays in rhetoric of the school to which Antiphon belongs. As regards matter, they are always so far dramatic that the thoughts and senti ments are such as he conceived possible for the supposed speaker. Thucydides abstains, as a rule, from moral com ment ; but he tells his story as no one could have told it who did not profoundly feel its tragic force ; and his gene ral claim to the merit of impartiality is not invalidated by the possible exceptions difficult to estimate in the cases of Cleon and Hyperbolas.

Strong as is the contrast between Herodotus and Thucydides, their works have yet a character which dis-