The great Persian War and its preliminaries

by G. B. Grundy

Theoretically it is, for the sake of dearness, desirable to keep these sections distinct: practically it is not possible to do so, since they must necessarily overlap.

Influence of personal character.

The most prominent personal characteristic of the historian which influenced his work was the absolute honesty with which he stated what he believed to be the truth, and the infinity of the pains which he took to arrive at it. DILIGENCE IN INQUIRY. It does not follow that what he believed to be true was true, but he did all that he could to get at the facts; and there is no single instance in his history of the war in which he can be shown to have deliberately perverted them. He had, like other men, his prejudices and predilections. He was affected, as all men must be, by the views held at the time at which he wrote concerning the time of which he wrote; and it is to these influences, and not to historical dishonesty on his part, that any fair judgment of him must attribute the obvious or suspected misstatements which are found in his Hellenic history. If this is not the case, he was one of the strangest compounds of the true and the false that ever lived. The dishonest historian does not want to know the truth; whereas it can be shown, not merely from Herodotus’ own language, but from actual facts existent at the present day, that Herodotus ardently desired to do so. Perhaps the most marked examples of this desire are afforded by the demonstrable care and pains which he devoted to his inquiries into the topography of the scenes of two events which are of peculiar interest,—the battles of Thermopylæ and Platæa. There can be no real question that he visited both places, and, not merely that, but that his examination of them was extremely careful. Whatever defects there are in the narrative of those two great battles are not of a topographical character, but are due almost entirely to difficulties in obtaining information. It may be argued that a man who took such pains to discover the truth of topographical detail, would be likely to take similar pains with details not topographical.

Deliberate omissions.

Another remarkable characteristic of his work is the way in which he will deliberately leave an important story incomplete, rather than insert details for which he had no real foundation of information. There are several examples of this. The history of the Ionian revolt, the most important section of the preliminary part of his work, is very defective. There are serious omissions, and the whole story is excessively fragmentary. A dishonest historian would have been tempted to round off the tale: an unscrupulous one would not have hesitated to do so.

But the most remarkable narrative of the incomplete type is that of Marathon. The best of raconteurs is content to give a mutilated account of what was reckoned, by the Athenian at any rate, one of the greatest events of Greek history; and the omissions are of such a character that it is almost impossible to believe that they can have been unconscious. Nor can it be supposed but that any amount of information of a certain type was available to him at the time at which he was at Athens. He must have rejected a large mass of the traditional evidence as unsatisfactory; otherwise the amount of descriptive narrative which he could have devoted to the battle would have been much greater than it is. The evident mistakes in such parts of the tradition as he does reproduce show the difficulty he experienced in arriving at the facts relating to the events of that time. The ten years of the past which had intervened between the campaign of Datis and Artaphernes and the great war made, no doubt, a world of difference to an author of later date, who was obliged to rely largely for his facts on contemporary oral evidence.

Prejudice.

Another class of narratives bearing on the question of the author’s honesty consists of those which contain matter suggestive of the suspicion that personal prejudice led him to deliberate perversion of facts. The question is not in the present instance as to the fact of perversion; but as to whether it was or was not of a deliberate character. There can be but little doubt that personal prejudice of various kinds did colour his views, and led him to do injustice to some of the men and events of the time.

In the story of the Ionian revolt he displays a most marked antipathy to the Ionians. He has hardly a good word to say of them in any department of life; their literary men are very inferior persons; their kinsmen across the sea were ashamed to claim connection with them; they were pusillanimous, if not actually cowardly, in their conduct during the war. Not one of these judgments can be regarded as sound, and the last and most severe is conspicuously refuted by the plain fact that it took Persia nigh seven years to crush their resistance, and that only at the expense of very serious loss to herself.

SOURCE OF “PREDUDICES.”