Page:Historyh00perrrich.djvu/25

Rh the personality of Agesilaus of Sparta, and depreciates so unduly, almost to the point of utter neglect, that of the Theban Epaminondas, whom Cicero called "princeps Graecorum." It is not too harsh a judgment to call Xenophon in history, as in philosophy, an agreeable dilettante.

Of his contemporary, Cratippus, whom Plutarch clearly regards as the leading historian of Greece for the period following the point at which Thucydides's work breaks off, we know too little to pass any broad judgment upon him, even allowing, with some English scholars, that a considerable historical fragment discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt by the Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt should be attributed to him and not to Theopompus. And what little we can learn about Philistus of Syracuse, the historian of Sicily and the two tyrants Dionysius, leads us to think that Cicero was apt in styling him a miniature Thucydides.

But now, with the disappearance of Epaminondas from the scene of his triumphs, with the rise of the Macedonian power to political supremacy in Greece, and with the remarkable intellectual domination of all Hellas by the orator Isocrates, a new political idea and a new literary form became current, and forced into new lines the art of writing history. The new political idea was that of the unity of the Greeks against Persia, and the new literary form was rhetorical prose. Historical writing became more widely national, and rhetorical devices ministered to the pleasure of hearers and readers as epic poetry or epic prose narrative had once done. When, therefore, Ephorus of Cyme wrote his Hellenica, or History of Greece, though he had a large national theme, corresponding well to the imperial theme of Thucydides, he did not continue the line of historical writers who, like Hellanicus and Thucydides, were devoted to fact more than to form, and wrote to instruct rather than to please—as Hesiod the poet had done, in protest against Homer—but rather the line which culminated in Herodotus, and