(a) is strong, as being Herodotus’ own evidence; and it is on Herodotus that the old scheme must rely. The passages quoted from Plutarch are, however, manifestly from the Herodotean source.
Objections (b), (c), (d) seem to me unanswerable. As I read the narrative, the old scheme of Grote and others cannot stand in face of them.
In so far as my experience goes, I think that it may be demonstrated that Herodotus’ mistakes, in his military history generally, arise almost wholly from—
(1) Misreading of sources.
(2) Use of defective or mistaken sources; not from the invention of imaginary facts.
His painful conscientiousness seems to be genuine, not fictitious. But, eminently unmilitary himself, he was peculiarly liable to misunderstand the information at his disposal with regard to military matters; and this, as it seems to me, is exactly what has happened with regard to his account of Salamis, and in the following way:—
It is, of course, a commonplace of criticism to say that Herodotus gives us no account of the general movements or manœuvres of the two fleets on the actual day of the battle, save that he mentions that the Æginetan vessels fell on the Phœnician ships which the Athenians put to flight. What I may call the enunciation of my proposition is this:—
This failure of information in this part of his narrative is due to the fact that he had already, in the previous part of it, used up his information on this point.
He antedated a movement made on the night preceding the battle to the previous afternoon, and further antedated the movements in the battle itself to the night preceding the battle.
It is curious and noticeable that, when this correction is made in Herodotus’ dating, and in the mistaken accounts of movements which the chronological error entailed, there is so close a resemblance between the narratives of Herodotus and Diodorus that they may be suspected of having been derived from sources which, if not absolutely identical, were close in similarity.