The Great Historians.
§ 39. I now pass on to the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, and their treatment by ancient and modern critics.
Herodotus and Thucydides.
Herodotus superior in subject.
It is our peculiar good fortune to have these two wars narrated respectively by the two greatest historians that Greece produced,—Herodotus and Thucydides. Unfortunately, perhaps, after the manner of most historians, they have made wars their chief subject; but this criticism applies less to Herodotus, who in leading up to his great climax has given us so many delightful digressions on foreign lands and their earlier history, that his book is rather a general account of the civilized world in the sixth century, with passages from older history, than a mere chronicle of the great war. Nor does he disdain to tell us piquant anecdotes and unauthorized gossip,—all giving us pictures of his own mind and time, if not an accurate record of older history. Making, therefore,
every allowance for the often uncritical, though always honest[92:1], view he took of men and affairs, there can be no doubt that the very greatness of his subject puts him far above Thucydides, whose mighty genius was unfortunately confined to a tedious and generally uninteresting conflict, consisting of yearly raids, military promenades, very small battles, and only one large and tragic expedition, throughout the whole course of its five-and-twenty years.
Narrow scope of Thucydides.
His deliberate omissions,
Still sadder is that this great man, having undertaken to narrate a very small, though a very long, war, so magnifies its importance as to make it out the greatest crisis that ever happened, and therefore excludes from his history almost everything which would be of real interest to the
permanent study of Greek life. He passes briefly over the deeply interesting but now quite obscure period of the rise of the Athenian power. A detailed history of the fifty years preceding his war would indeed have been an inestimable boon to posterity. He passes in contemptuous silence over all the artistic development of Athens. The origin of the drama, Æschylus, Susarion, Cratinus; the growth of sculpture, Pheidias, Ictinus, the building of the Parthenon, of the temple of Theseus,—all this is a blank in his narrative. And yet he does not think it inconsistent with his plan to give us a sketch of the famous fifty years that elapsed between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. He proposes to correct the inaccuracies of Hellanicus, his only predecessor in this field, and there can be no doubt that what he has condescended to give us is both accurate and valuable. But so scanty are his details, so frequent his silence on really important public events, that we are fain to turn to any inferior author to fill the gap.
