Greek philosophy and science had begun in Ionia and then passed to Athens. To the thinkers of the fourth century B.C. the fall of Athens must have seemed a great disaster, but in reality it was of the utmost service to the world. The Greek spirit was one of those imperishable things that cannot die, and it was to go out from Athens and spread over a wider world than it had hitherto known. It spread first to Alexandria where, in the Hellenistic Age, the next great group of philosophers and men of science were to be found.
IV. GREEK LITERATURE: THE HISTORIANS
The word history is a Greek word and means an enquiry. The Greeks were not the first people in the world who wrote history, but they wrote it as it had never been written before, and some of the greatest history in the world is that which was written by Greeks. These writers were not content with merely narrating events that had taken place, they made what the word history means, an enquiry. They possessed the imagination, not only to describe events and scenes vividly, but to feel as the people about whom they were writing felt, and to understand the passions that moved them at great crises of their history. They were the first historians who took the trouble to find out why nations and individuals acted as they did, and to sift their evidence, finding out what was true and what was false.
The oldest of the Greek historians was Herodotus, the Father of History, an Ionian born in Halicarnassus in 484 B.C. He spent a good part of his life travelling, during which time he collected materials which he afterwards used in his history. He was a man who was intensely interested in everything he saw, a very credulous traveller, for he seems to have believed almost everything that was told him: old traditions, all kinds of miraculous occurrences, and many things that it is evident could never have happened. Though he undoubtedly believed a great deal that was not true, he did not swallow all that was told him, for after narrating some marvel he will say: "I am bound to report all that is said, but I am not bound to believe it."
Herodotus was a deeply religious man, and he lived before the disturbing days when men began to question the existence of the gods. To him history was a great drama, the plot of which was the triumph of the Greek over the Barbarian, which he saw as the will of the gods, and to him, as to all devout Greeks of his day, all wrong-doing, all disobedience to the will of the gods brought its own punishment, its retribution, what the Greeks called its Nemesis.
As a story-teller, Herodotus is unrivalled. He wrote his history in order that "the great and wonderful deeds done by the Greeks and Persians should not lack renown," and the earlier books which give an account of all he had learnt in his travels in the East, of Egypt and Babylonia, of Lydia and Persia, lead up to the great climax, the invasion of Greece by the Persians.[[23]] In the pages of Herodotus we live again, as we live nowhere else, through all the excitement and thrill of the days when Greece fought the Barbarian and drove him out of the land.
The greatest of the Greek historians was Thucydides, great not only among the Greek writers, but among the historians of the world. He was born about 471 B.C., and he wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides was an Athenian, a man of wealth and good position, and was one of the few who had the plague and recovered from it. As the war went on, he was anxious to fight and help to bring it to a victorious close, but a far greater career was in store for him. He was elected a general and sent at the head of an army to relieve Amphipolis and prevent its surrender to the Spartans. But he arrived too late, the city had been taken, and he was exiled in consequence.[[24]] To this exile we owe his history.
Thucydides is one of the most accurate and impartial of historians. He was filled with an abiding love for Athens, but, unlike some Athenians, he felt no bitterness towards her for exiling him. The only remark he makes about his banishment is that it gave him the opportunity to write his history. He was scrupulously fair to both sides, and he tells us himself of the care he took to be accurate and to accept nothing on the evidence of mere tradition.
Men do not discriminate, [he said], and are too ready to receive ancient traditions about their own as well as about other countries; and so little trouble do they take in the search after truth; so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand. Of the events of the war I have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to any notion of my own; I have described nothing but what I either saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry. The task was a laborious one, because eye-witnesses of the same occurrences gave different accounts of them, as they remembered or were interested in the actions of one side or the other. If he who desires to have before his eyes a true picture of the events which have happened, and of the like events which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things, shall pronounce what I have written to be useful, then I shall be satisfied. My history is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition which is heard and forgotten.[[25]]
Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides did not trace events to the will of the gods, but he held that the deeds of men and the use or misuse they made of their opportunities were responsible for them. He never moralizes, but in the clear and reasoned order in which he narrates events the story is carried down from the beginning to its inevitable conclusion.