Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/286

264 264 HISTORY OF THE most of the ancient historians, whose names are enumerated by Diony- sius of Halicarnassus, belonged to this class*. § 7. Hellanicus of Mytilene was almost a contemporary of He- rodotus ; we know that at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war he was 65 years old f, and still continued to write. The character of Hellanicus as a mythographer and historian is essentially different from that of the early chroniclers, such as Acusilaus and Phere-ydes; he has far more the character of a learned compiler, whose object is, not merely to note down events, but to arrange his materials and to correct the errors of others. Besides a number of writings upon parti- cular legends and local fables, he composed a work entitled " the Priestesses of Here of Argos;" in which the women who had filled this priesthood were enumerated up to a very remote period (on no better authority than of certain obscure traditions), and various striking events of the heroic time were arranged in chronological order, accord- ing to this series. Hellanicus could hardly have been the first who ventured to make a list of this kind, and to dress it up with chrono- logical dates. Before his time the priests and temple-attendants at Argos had perhaps employed their idle hours in compiling a series of the priestesses of Here, and in explaining it by monuments supposed to be of great antiquity +. The Carneonicce of Hellanicus would be of more importance for our immediate purpose, as it contained a list of the victors in the musical and poetical contests of the Carnea at Sparta (from Olymp. 26. b. c. 676) §, and was therefore one of the first at- tempts at literary history. The writings of Hellanicus contained a vast mass of matter ; since, besides the works already mentioned, he wrote accounts of Phoenicia, Persia, and Egypt, and also a description of a journey to the renowned oracle of Zeus-Ammon in the desert of Libya (the »enuineness of which last work was however doubted). He also descended to the history of his own time, and described some of the events between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, but briefly, and without chronological accuracy, according to the reproach of Thu- cydides. § 8. Among the contemporaries of Hellanicus was (according to the statement of Dionysius) Xanthus, the son of Candaules of Sardis, a Lydian, but one who had received a Greek education. His work Paros, De modes of Phigalia, Amelesagoras of Chalcedon (or Athens). f The learned Pamphila in Gellius N. A. XV. 23. Instances of similar catalogues of priests (in the concoction of which some pious fraud must have been employed) are the genealogy of the Buta § See Ch XII. § 2.
 * Eugeon of Samos (above Ch. XI. § 16), Deiochus of Proconnesus, Eudemusof