The histories of Herodotus;

HERODOTUS ix
when he began his story-book. The thought that seems to
dominate the whole was at best an after-thought, and what
we have is an attempt to bring a mass of heterogeneous mate-
rial into some kind of connection with the history of the sec-
ond Persian war, the only part of the work that has any true
coherence. By processes familiar to the student of Homeric
criticism, evidence is adduced to show the imperfect welding
of the mass and the incompleteness of the work. References
are made to stories that are never told, to persons that never
recur, and not only so, but, according to these critics, the
narrative fails of a proper close. It should have ended earlier
or later. Even the marvellous style has not escaped criticism,
and attempts have been made to prove that the histories lack
the supreme touch of the master's hand.
But we must beware of over-analysis. If Herodotus did
not set out with a fixed purpose and a definite plan, if he
began as a curious traveller, and not as a systematic investi-
gator, still there must have been in his mind a general con-
ception of the universe, which grew clearer and sharper as
he matured, so that long before he came to write his preface
the work of his life was revealed to himself. Revision, elabora-
tion, there must have been, but the unity of the work lies in
its moral purport.
At all events it is this unity, this grasp of a vast and varied
material, that is one of the special claims set up for Herodotus
as the originator of a new department of literature, and before
proceeding to consider the other points in which the historian
differentiates himself from his predecessors it is necessary to
give some brief account of the earlier writers of Greek prose.
The extent of Herodotus's obligations to his predecessors
is variously estimated, and there are those who have made
Herodotus out to be an unscrupulous conveyer of other men's
labours. But the charge of plagiarism, to which modern writers
are extremely sensitive, glanced harmless from the armour
of the Greek of the best period. Later Greeklings have much
to say about stealing one from another. The true masters
helped themselves to what they needed. A good thing was