[sect. 7]
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