INTRODUCTION

General considerations in support of the priority of Bks. 7, 8, 9

The view that the contents of the last three Books were the earliest portion of the work collected, and even put by the author into literary shape, has been repeatedly advanced by competent critics,¹¹ but cannot be said to be much in favour at the present time. The case, indeed, has never been quite fully stated, nor the whole argument sufficiently elaborated. Undue stress has been laid on one or two partial observations, and certain cumulative arguments have been overlooked, or treated as self-evident. An absolutely demonstrable conclusion is not likely to be attained upon this subject, the problem being mainly a literary one, where direct testimony is not forthcoming. But at least the question should be recognized as a purely open one at starting, unprejudiced by the particular order in which the subject matter is now presented in the finished and completed work. The primitive assumption that the Logoi of Herodotus were collected and written down by him in just the order in which they now meet us in his work, though substantially maintained by Kirchhoff,¹² is neither probable in itself nor in accordance [p. xlvi] with analogy, nor borne out by the inner indications to be found in the work itself. The clearest single test of such an assumption is the position of the second Book; for the occurrence of this colossal excursus, so early in the course of the work, is difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis that the existing work was conceived as a whole, and its several parts composed exactly in the existing order. The date of the author's visit to Egypt, the date of the composition of the second Book, which is a unity in itself, must be treated, at starting, as open questions; so must the date and origin of each subordinate unit, into which the work of Herodotus can be fairly analyzed, be left at starting an open question: the Skythian, the Libyan, the Lydian, the Medo-Persian histories, the records and traditions of particular Hellenic states (Samos, Athens, Sparta, Korinth, Syracuse), the Ionian Revolt, the Marathonian campaign, and likewise the account of the Great Invasion, must all be regarded as potentially separable units. The problems of genesis, date and composition arise equally in relation to the many precise passages of a digressional or excursional character with which the work is enriched; such materials have been gathered, perhaps, at widely different epochs of the author's life, and may have been inserted in the work at various dates; the order of their occurrence in the work by no means corresponds of necessity to the chronological order of their collection, or of their insertion. One conclusion, perhaps only one, need be posited at starting, that the whole work of Herodotus being composed of many different and separable units, partly corresponding to, but partly irrespective of, the existing division into nine Books, these parts, or subdivisions, still recognizable in the work will have existed, some or all, in a state of relative completion, or substantial independence, before they were brought together and fused, more or less flawlessly, into the existing whole. The exact degree of that independence and individuality may have varied in different cases, great and small, and can never have amounted, except perhaps in the case of the second Book, and of some minor and clearly detachable excursuses, digressions, stories, to complete identity of form and substance with the passages as now observable in the work of Herodotus. [p. xlvii] Any other assumption would involve the corollary that Herodotus, notwithstanding the splendid artistic result, put his materials together by a purely mechanical method, and that the final redaction, perhaps the last of several revisions, was without appreciable effect upon the composition, the fusion, the organisation of the whole. Such a corollary were an absurdity. But there is no inherent absurdity in the view that the artistic whole is a product, not of one original and single inspiration, proceeding from one single idea, but of a gradual enlargement of plan, and probably of materials and knowledge; there is no absurdity in the assumption that even the skilful and artistic hand of Herodotus, applied again and again to his great and growing work, failed to remove and obliterate entirely all traces of its genesis. The genesis of the work is a legitimate subject of speculation, and what theory is at once more simple and more consistent with the work, as we find it, than the view that Herodotus first projected and, to a greater or less extent, first elaborated the History of the Persian War, in Bks. 7, 8, 9, though not in quite the exact form, or with all the details, now presented in those Books; and that afterwards there developed before his mind the possibility of working up into a vast prelude to that main theme materials amassed during many years of study, research, inquiry, travel, a prelude that should pourtray the historic antecedents, both Barbarian and Hellenic, of the great struggle, and present in vivid colours a panorama of the two worlds that clashed together in the final duel?

There would certainly have been much more of novelty in an attempt to relate, in an adequate and also picturesque manner, the story of a recent war, as represented in the last three Books of Herodotus, than in the attempt to reproduce geographical descriptions and ethnographical memoranda more or less in the style of Hekataios, such as are to be found in the second and fourth Books, and to a considerable extent also in the first, third, and fifth. The precise advance which Herodotus made upon his prose predecessors appears to have lain in his applying to history methods and ideas drawn from the only sphere of literary art so far practised, poetry, and chiefly the Epos and the Drama. To emulate Phrynichos and Aischylos by taking a subject from the immediate past, and to relate it in prose, with artifices and methods largely drawn from the Homeric Epos as well as from [p. xlviii] the stage, was an inspiration far surpassing any previous achievement in prose composition, and one well worthy the genius of Herodotus. While the subject was thus original, the methods of representation were largely imitative. There is no part of the work of Herodotus where the Homeric influence is so visible as in the last three Books. The introduction is modelled upon the first Book of the Iliad; the second Book of the Iliad supplies a good precedent for the catalogue of Army and Navy. Elsewhere Herodotus might seem to have drawn his inspiration from the Odyssey, as he travels, or seems to travel, over the world, visiting the tribes and cities of men in many climes; the concentration of interest on the war in the last three Books reproduces rather the atmosphere of the older epos. It is unnecessary to pursue these analogies into detail: the direct deposit of Homeric style and terminology is strongest in the last three Books.¹³ A similar observation holds of the relation of these Books to the Drama. The influence of Aischylos is undeniable, less in details concerning the march or the battle, where there are also noticeable differences between Herodotus and the poet, than in the presentation of character, and in the moral setting of the whole. It has been observed also that the speeches in the last three Books of Herodotus are far more truly dramatic than the speeches in the earlier Books.¹⁴ There they are too often mere substitutes for narrative; here they have a real bearing on action, and the march of events. It was not, we may fairly surmise, at the end of his life and literary achievement that Herodotus would show most clearly such influences. The distinctly religious tone of the narrative favours the same conclusion. The heroic and poetical standpoint of Herodotus breaks down in the later decades of the century into the colder estimates of Thucydides.¹⁵ Herodotus writes this history in the spirit of Aischylos and of Simonides, of Panyasis and of Pindar. The little we know of his biography, and particularly of his early education, favours the view that the subject he first chose for literary illustration in prose was an epical subject, such as that offered by the invasion of Xerxes. Herodotus was trained, so to speak, in the school of his uncle Panyasis, one of the last of the epic poets. His history of the [p. xlix] great invasion is but the application of the principles of Panyasis to a new subject, the freshest that could have engaged his attention, or lent itself to such treatment.¹⁶ Materials and encouragement would not be wanting in Halikarnassos, where Artemisia had but just passed away; in Samos, which had played no unimportant part at the crucial moment; in Ionia, which had supplied no small part of the King's Fleet, and had revolted, for the second time, as Ionians were proud to remember, from the Persian yoke on the morrow of Mykale. When Herodotus began to write, about the middle of the fifth century, some thirty years after the victory of Salamis, and before the travels, more or less extensive, in Europe, in Libya, in Asia, which are implied in the earlier Books, what boon could he bring to European audiences more acceptable than the deft and glorious records of the Greek victory over the hosts of Asiameet pendant to the Trojan war or what stronger motive could he have for visiting European Hellas than the desire to complete, by the means there available to him, in Athens, in Delphi, in Sparta, the projected story, and round it into a finished whole?

Whatever be the varying proportion of written to oral sources in the successive parts of the work of Herodotus, for no part of his record can Herodotus have had oral tradition so copious and so fresh as for the history of the Invasion contained in the last three Books. The amount of matter in these Books drawn from literary sources has, indeed, been generally under-estimated; but be it set never so high, there remains a larger and more constant echo of the vox viva in this volume than in any other equal portion of the work. It could hardly be otherwise from the nature of the case, and from the relation of the author to his subject. Herodotus stands indeed to his subject in one degree less intimate than Thucydides to the annals of the Peloponnesian war, but he was only just not contemporary with the expedition of Xerxes. The elder generation, amongst whom he grew up, had taken part in the war, upon the Persian side; nor was it only with one medizing Greek from Greece proper that he had held converse.¹⁷ The happy selection of a virgin subject, knowledge of which was still largely to be gleaned from the lips of living men [p. l] and women, themselves witnesses and actors in the drama, goes far to explain the most characteristic quality of the author's style, the εἰρομένη λέξις, that impression of the living voice in the literary narrative, caught naturally in the first instance from the lips of the story-teller, mother, or mother's brother, exile and refugee, Ionian, Dorian, Persian, and what not. It is, indeed, not easy to detect more than one style in Herodotus, the acquisition or formation of which is most readily explained by the supposition that it was first acquired and exercised on such a subject, and on such materials, as those presented in the last three Books, and then applied, with but slight modification, to more remote subjects, for which literary evidences were already forthcoming in greater abundance, as was the case, in varying degrees, with the earlier Books of the finished work.¹⁸