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 speeches in his design was due to special influences of the age as well as to the peculiar bent of his mind; we have to consider what had been done before him, and the plan on which he went to work.

At the beginning of the Peloponnesian war a Greek prose literature scarcely yet existed. The Ionian prose-writers before Herodotus, or contemporary with him, are known to us only from scanty fragments. But the Augustan age possessed all, or nearly all, their writings; and Dionysius of Halicarnassus has described their general characteristics, comparing them collectively with Herodotus and Thucydides. These Ionian writers, he says, treat the annals of cities and people separately ,—not combining them into a large picture, as Herodotus does. Their common object was to diffuse a knowledge of the legends which lived in oral tradition, and of the written records preserved in temples or