INTRODUCTION

The false and the true estimates of Herodotus and his work

In conclusion, there are two types, or tendencies, in the recent criticism of Herodotus and his work, which may here be expressly disavowed. They are alike inelastic and onesided; perfunctory and wanting in historical imagination; critical, yet not half critical enough. While appearing to assign to the work of Herodotus a higher place than can be claimed for it by a more discriminative analysis, in reality they alike depreciate the combination of art and learning exhibited in the work. (a) On the one hand we see the revival of an apology for Herodotus, which finds little if anything to censure in his work from the historical point of view, and argues the case for the defence, as [p. xcv] though under the circumstances, or under any circumstances, the work of the historian of the Medic wars could have been done no better. This apology involves too great a self-sacrifice to be acceptable. We are to admit the numbering of the Persian host at Doriskos, and its results, as historical; we must exclude appeal to the permanent and verifiable conditions of strategy and tactics, and allow much for possible in antiquity which would be impossible to-day; we shall confess that fact is none the less fact though contaminated with fiction, and that a half-truth is as true as a whole. Such attempts to reduce to insignificance the exaggerations, the inconsistencies, the absurdities, the impossibilities in the Herodotean record, and to exalt the work as a whole into a world-history, or even a history of the Medic wars, can only depreciate its unconscious values as a mirror of the age and of the conditions under which it was produced, without procuring any credit to the actual story of the war, to the glimpses of policy, and the items of biography involved. To reconstruct, so far as possible, the true history of the Medic wars, it is not necessary to ignore the shortcomings of our chief authority, or to suppose that his reputation can be rescued by displaying the inconsistencies, or vagaries, of modern criticism: the pathetic apotheosis of Herodotus, as an historical authority, avenges itself doubly, in the inadequacy of the historical result, in the inconsistency of the literary critique. (b) On the other hand the advice to abandon all attempts at separating fact and fiction in the work of Herodotus, to treat it all as pure literature, to sandwich it in our libraries between the Homeric poems and the Waverley novels, is a mere counsel of indolence, or of despair. Even the earlier Books of Herodotus, not excepting the portions of them which deal with non-Hellenic affairs, deserve more respect than is implied in such an advice; while the Books, or the Logoi, dealing with things Hellenic, acclaim an indefinitely higher though critically varying appreciation in the Forum of History. The last three Books in especial, despite the elements of poetry, rhetoric, anecdote, moralizing, error, and sheer ignorance which they contain, will reward a searching examination at the bar of historical criticism. Only, one may not hope to pass a single and simple verdict upon each and every constituent in the story; one must be at some trouble to distinguish Logos from Logos and line from line in every Book; one must be pre[p. xcvi] pared to find wares of widely different values side by side in the Herodotean bazaar. The contribution which Herodotus makes to the actual history of his own times, of the Pentekontateris, is not inconsiderable, and ranks with the best materials of a Thucydides, a Xenophon, a Polybios: the only pity is, there does not happen to be more of it. The records of the Medic war, in its two campaigns, its operations by sea and on land, its inception and antecedents, its character and course, are indeed inadequate and to some extent irrational: nevertheless, there is undoubtedly presented by the story a correct sequence of the major events, a not wholly misleading account of the relations between states, a fair outline of their respective policies and conduct, and many hints towards an estimate of the services rendered by the principals on both sides. This volume too, like the others, is a treasury of information upon a host of topics not directly connected with the bare story of the war, and sheds side-lights, in floods, upon the Hellenic and non-Hellenic worlds of the day. Ignorance and prejudice have deeply marred and stained the traditions, and authorities, upon which Herodotus, the rather as not strictly contemporary with his proper subject, had to rely; and, though by no means helplessly at the mercy of the first comer, he had not the necessary degree of critical faculty to sift grain from chaff, and wheat from tares, in his harvest of hearsay; yet still, for all that, the story of the war stands for ever in his pages on its merits an indispensable chapter of Hellenic and of human history, to be the delight and vexation of men and critics from generation to generation. If there is still so little agreement, even in regard to the negative criticism of the records, it is perhaps due to the failure of our scholars at starting sufficiently to discriminate the various elements of the problem, sufficiently to analyse the component factors in the general result, so as to evolve the widely different values, which belong to different statements, occurring side by side in the historian's pages, and all by him presented bona fide as equally trustworthy.

In fine, Herodotus was neither a mere story-telling prosepoet, nor a scientific historian, but a genial minister to both history and literature alike. The marvel is that, seeing how brilliant a raconteur he is, there should be so much history in his work; or that, where there is so much history, the work should [p. xcvii] read so well. The final test of its utility is to consider the loss, not merely to literature but to learning, had the work of Herodotus perished, or never been written. Confining our attention here to the Persian war, what should we glean of it without him? An aperu from Aischylos, some epigrams by Simonides, a few references in the later literature, the gross errors of Ktesias, the rhetorical and systematic fiction of Ephoros (apud Diodorum), itself the child of a crude exploitation of Herodotus, a handful of vignettes from Plutarch, a list of monuments in Pausanias. For the full and real story Herodotus holds the field. There is, indeed, no ancient historian, whether upon his own ground or on general grounds, with whom Herodotus need fear comparison. He was more comprehensive than Thucydides; he was more candid than Xenophon; he was more brilliant than Polybios. As a military, or even as a political historian, he must yield the palm to the rivals named; but, in the larger view of history, which embraces every experience of humanity, treats no aspect of human life as common or unclean, regards man, under all conditions, and in all times and places, his fortunes and misfortunes, his adventures and achievements, as the most interesting topic in the world, and the portrayal and literary perpetuation of all that as the work best worth doing under the sun, Herodotus keeps his rank as the premier historian of antiquity: Ἰάδος ἀρχαίης ἱστορίης πρύτανις.