INTRODUCTION

Is the work of Herodotus incomplete, or unfinished?

Is the work of Herodotus, then, incomplete, unfinished, as it stands? The comparative shortness of the ninth Book does not make for an affirmative. Though the division into Books is not the author's doing, the ninth Book possesses practically a complete structure of its own, as above exhibited; the story of Mykale and of Sestos is complete in itself, and the Colophon with which the Book, and so the work, concludes is Herodotus' own way of marking from time to time a pause, a finis, more or less absolute.⁷ Nor are such peculiarities as may be detected in the ninth Book attributable to want of finish, but mainly to the nature of the subject and the Sources.⁸ The final Book of Thucydides may be taken to show unmistakeable signs of incompleteness and want of finish: a chronological scheme manqu, speeches still all left in the oblique oration, stylistic peculiarities, the abrupt breaking off. Not merely has the annalistic record of Thucydides been arrested some years short of its promised conclusion, but the latter end of it is obviously in the raw, as compared with other portions. No such assertions can be sustained against the final Book of Herodotus; at most it might be said that Herodotus intended to carry on his story further, that the main subject has not reached its proper end with the capture of Sestos, and that another Book, or Books, would be required to bring down the history of the war to its actual finale. But what should this proper finale have been? Ought Herodotus to have carried his story down to the transfer of the naval hegemony, or to the victory of the Eurymedon, or to the Peace of Kallias, if there was such a Peace, or to the de facto cesser of hostilities between Persia and Athens, wherever that is to be placed? Not one of these events, real or supposed, would be a better finish to the story than the point at which Herodotus leaves off, before the schism between Sparta and Athens, before the new departure involved in carrying the war into the enemy's country, before the disappearance and disgrace of the heroes of the war, before the entrance on the scene of new [p. xli] actors and the rise of new interests. Herodotus is an artist, not a mere annalist; but, even from the strictest historical point of view, the story of the great expedition may be considered ended after the battles of Plataia and Mykale, with the triumphant return of the Athenian fleet from Sestos, bringing home the cables which had yoked the Hellespont, linked Asia and Europe, and rendered the vast invasion possible. No ancient authority, or critic, regarded the work of Herodotus as incomplete, or suspected an intention on his part to carry his narrative below the point just indicated. On the contrary, the Persian war, the great expedition, meant for his successors, from Thucydides to Diodoros, exactly what it had meant for Herodotus himself.⁹ To suppose that these authorities, imprimis Thucydides, accepted an imperfect conception of the subject due to the accidental failure of Herodotus to carry out his whole project, is to ascribe to them an exaggerated respect for his authority. Probably the conception of τὰ Μηδικά as the Invasion of Xerxes, comprising the two campaigns of 480 and 479 B.C., came to Herodotus himself ready-made, an accepted view of the case, justifiable on its merits: he simply stereotyped and gave it currency. Nowhere does he indicate precisely in advance the limits of his subject, or the date, or event, which is the terminus of the war; there is no ground so convincing as that would be, had he announced an end which he fails to reach, for charging the work with incompleteness. The only plausible argument in support of the view that the work of Herodotus is incomplete as it stands arises from the unfulfilled promises made by the author in the course of the work. There are three such cases in all: two of these, the promise to relate the capture of Nineveh (1. 106), and the promise to make mention of some kings of Babylon (1. 184), do not affect the conclusion of the work as it stands; for no one can suppose that the fulfilment of these pledges was to find place in the present work after the record of the capture of Sestos. Either Herodotus at some time contemplated a distinct work on Assyrian history, or he intended to add to the end of the third Book, as we have it, some further [p. xlii] notices of Babylon and Assyria. It is difficult to set down the non-fulfilment of these two promises, in pari materia, and occurring so nearly together, to an oversight, and I am inclined to believe that Herodotus had projected a separate work on Assyrian history, which he never achieved. The argument is different in the third and only remaining case, the promise to complete the story of Epialtes, 7. 213, which is nowhere fulfilled. But, if we are not here in presence of a pure oversight, at most the case proves that Herodotus did not quite fully and finally revise his work; it cannot prove that he had projected a later close, or finale. Such a project would have landed him in the Pentekontateris to encounter all the difficulties and inconsequence above adverted to, in seeking a better, a more artistic conclusion than his actual work presents. Moreover, the numerous explicit references to events of the Pentekontateris, which occur throughout the work of Herodotus, and especially in the last three Books, supply a positive bar to the supposition that he intended to carry his connected and continuous narrative over any considerable portion of the period subsequent to the capture of Sestos. On any such hypothesis those references would involve reiterated anticipations of the narrative still to come of an inartistic and clumsy sort, which has no parallel in the actual work of Herodotus.¹⁰ Yet, if we are led to acquiesce in the view that the work of Herodotus missed the very last revision from the author's hand, it is less on the strength of this one clearly unfulfilled pledge than on account of the occurrence of numerous inconsequences, or maladroitnesses, which repeated filing might perhaps have removed from the finished work, much as your modern author will revise a complete and final edition of his works: though even in such a case a writer rarely succeeds in removing all inequalities, or inconsequences, from productions drawn from various quarters, dealing with many diverse interests and topics, and spread in composition over a considerable number of years; and it may be doubted whether any number of revisions and retractations could quite have brought every story, every chapter, every line in the work of Herodotus into perfect consistency with every other, in view of his empirical methods and conflicting sources.

A further argument in favour of the view that the work of Herodotus is complete, after the author's own conception, is to be found in the general plan and scope of the work as a whole. The whole falls, as has been already, and elsewhere more fully shown, into three great sections, or volumes, each comprising, as it happens, a trio of Books, and each nearly equivalent in bulk to each. A remarkable symmetry and proportion obtain in the tripartite work, anticipating, perhaps suggesting, the symmetry in the work of Thucydides, had the latter but obtained the destined bulk and finish from its author's hand. In neither case was the actual plan of the complete and symmetric work in existence before the inception of the undertaking: in each case, surely, the idea of the whole dawned and grew upon the author in the course of composition. This hypothesis is verifiable in the case of Thucydides, and highly probable in the case of Herodotus. But in the latter case, whatever may have been the point or stage at which the author first conceived the idea of the work as a whole, matters nothing to the present argument for the completeness of the work as it stands. To have added, that is inserted, the Assyrian Logoi, which were surely to have been as bulky as the Egyptian, or at least as the Libyan Logoi, would have destroyed the symmetry of the extant whole, a parte ante; to have carried the chronicle of the wars with Persia down to the battle of the Eurymedon, or the more complete end of actual hostilities, about the time of Perikles' ascendency, would have destroyed the symmetry of the work a parte post. The addition, indeed, of the further records, or Logoi, indicated to the first and the third sections, or volumes, of the work respectively, would have left the symmetry of the composition inviolate, but would enormously have increased the bulk of the whole, would have still further retarded the main argument by a fresh digression, and would have destroyed the moral atmosphere and effect of the work, by involving the story in the decadence and disruption of Hellas. It may have been the very impossibility of adding to the story of the Persian war, of carrying it below the capture of Sestos, without departing from recognized principles, and becoming entangled in endless difficulties and inconsequences, which determined Herodotus to preserve the proportions of his work as a whole by omitting the Ἀσσύριοι λόγοι from the first volume, and reserving the [p. xliv] fuller stories of Nineveh and of the Babylonian kings for an entirely distinct work. If the Assyrian Logoi were to have been a separate and distinct work, as appears most probable, then the references and promises in respect of them in no degree bear out the view that the existing work was incomplete, or unfinished, in the author's judgement and conception. The argument has to rely simply upon the promise in the seventh Book, a frail support for a conclusion otherwise so improbable; and as it can be shown, from numerous authentic additions and insertions, that the author revised his work certainly once, and probably more than once, the most extreme conclusion justified by the state of the evidences amounts to no more than the admission that Herodotus, had he revised his work yet once again, might have removed a few more of the still remaining inconcinnities, which go to prove that the work, as we have it, artistic, complete, and highly finished as it is, a whole, with a beginning, a middle and an end, nevertheless was not originally conceived and projected upon the lines, and with the structure and great argument thereinto imported by the author in the course of his years of apprenticeship and mastery.

Last, and not least, if not merely is the work a result of years of study, of wandering, of experience and production, as all critics will in some degree admit: if also the earliest portion, or section, of the work to attain relative completeness and definite form was just the History of the Great Invasion, τὰ Μηδικά, our last three Books: why, then, the argument in favour of regarding the work as complete and finished, in structure and general conception, gains additional weight and substance. If the history of the Medic war was the primary and principal subject to the record and illustration of which Herodotus first addressed himself, it is probable that the history of the Medic war is complete and finished in the author's conception and creation. This history forming the end of the Herodotean work, as we have it, that work is finished, and has reached its proper end, whatever lacunae may be detected in its earlier portions. The problem of the order in which the various parts and portions of the work of Herodotus were composed, or the materials for their composition collected, is in itself an important and interesting problem to the student of historical literature. Should it be decided in accordance with the hypothesis just indicated, it must be held to afford [p. xlv] fresh ground for recognizing the work as finished and complete in its present form; and all arguments for the substantive priority of Books 7, 8, 9 become ancillary arguments for the completion and completeness of the work. Should the problem of the order of composition be decided otherwise, or be held definitely insoluble, still all the considerations already adduced remain to make it practically quite certain that the connected and continuous story of the Barbarian and Hellenic worlds, and of the wars waged between them, had reached its end and conclusion, as conceived and projected for his work by the author; and nothing in the work itself, much less elsewhere, justifies the view that the story of the war is incomplete.