The histories of Herodotus;

V
vi
HERODOTUS
to the whole. It gives the authorship. It tells us that it is
a setting forth of investigation, that its object is to prevent
the history of the world from being effaced by the lapse of
time. The great and marvellous deeds wrought by Greeks
and non-Greeks are not to be left unfamoused, and the cause
of the war between them is to be set down. Thucydides is
satisfied with how? Herodotus demands why? Thucydides
looks to history as a lesson for future generations drawn from
experience. Herodotus looks to history as a record of the
dealings of a higher power. For the wrath of Achilles sub-
stitute the envy of the gods, and we have a movement like
that of the " Iliad."
The history opens on mythical ground, but it is noteworthy
that Herodotus singles out the Phoenicians as the first
Orientals who came into contact with the Greeks, and it is sig-
nificant that Crete plays the part of a breedbate, as she has
always done from that day to this. The Eternal Feminine is
at the bottom of the trouble between East and West, Io and
Medea and Helen. But these old, unhappy, far-off things are
soon dismissed, and we come in an early chapter to Croesus the
Lydian, the first to make the Greek feel the power of the East.
The history of the dynasty of Croesus and his overthrow by
Cyrus, with the necessary account of the Medes and Per-
sians, takes up about two thirds of the first book. Upon the
subjection of the Lydian monarchy follows the subjugation
of the Ionians and other peoples of Asia Minor—a task which
was intrusted by Cyrus to his lieutenant Harpagus, while
Cyrus himself undertook to reduce Babylon. After Babylon
the Great comes the expedition of Cyrus against the Massa-
getae, and his death in battle with Tomyris. It is a dramatic
ending, a notable illustration of the envy of the gods, of the
law of compensation. (The second book, after briefly record-
ing the accession of Cambyses and his designs on Egypt,
takes Egypt itself for its theme, and so wholly is Egypt the
theme that the book has been lifted out of the complex and
treated as an independent work. But we must remember that
biologists have succeeded in isolating the heart itself, and he