The great Persian War and its preliminaries

by G. B. Grundy

Unprejudiced judgments.

The expressions of his own personal judgment on historical questions which arise in his narrative are for the most part stated with reference to the motives which prompted certain actions, and are of very various value. On purely military questions they are, with the striking exception of his statement of opinion as to the motive of the withdrawal of the army from Thessaly, as a rule of little weight. He did not possess that practical knowledge of war and of command which alone could have rendered his personal views on such questions a matter of serious consideration. His excellence as a military historian is not on that side. It lies in his having been a diligent, accurate, honest recorder of facts, in so far as a man could be who wrote under the circumstances under which he wrote.

Rhetoric and drama.

It is very fortunate for the world that he was not appreciably affected by that craze for rhetoric which prevailed in the Athens of the last years of his life,—that rhetoric which was to play such havoc with the written history of a later age. He was probably too old to be largely influenced by that which seemed to the older men of the time an undesirable or, when they suffered from its exercise, even pernicious fad, even though certain sides of it might appeal strongly to his literary instinct. If contemporary writing did at all influence this creator of literature in a new form, it is perhaps in the works of the great dramatists that the source of such influence is to be sought. In any case, it was not sufficiently strong to affect his reliability as an historian. The reports of speeches in his work in what profess to be the actual words of the speaker, in cases in which it is certain that the actual words cannot have survived, is to be attributed to dramatic rather than to rhetorical feeling; and the absence of the latter influence in his work generally is shown by the conspicuous absence of a fundamental canon of rhetoric,—the ordered arrangement of topic.

SOURCES.

Sources.

To discuss fully the possible sources of information to which Herodotus had recourse in various parts of his work would in itself lake up a volume, wherein much of the matter would be highly controversial.

It will be sufficient here to point out as briefly as possible those sources which are indicated either clearly or with high probability as lying behind his narrative of the war and its immediate prelude:—

1. The historian’s personal observation and personal inquiry;

2. Records, official and semi-official;