The histories of Herodotus;

XVI
HERODOTUS
tone is gone, the manifold stops of the organ voice, but the
English Herodotus retains the picturesqueness of the narrative,
the flow of the stream, the play of the eddy ; and something
of the dramatic impersonation is kept alive. The women
of Herodotus are true womanly in English as in Greek. The
tears of mortal things drip on our hearts in English as in
Greek. The princes and the sages of Herodotean history hold
language fitting their high estate, their far-reaching wisdom.
Those who emphasize the simplicity of Herodotus are prone
to forget that antiquity recognised in him magnificence as
well.
But no matter how much or how little of the original charm
hangs about the translation of Herodotus, for the apprecia-
tion of the genius of the author, for the correct estimate of
vj^ his position among the great writers of the world, something
must be said of the artistic character of his language. Herodo-
tus was a conscious artist. No happy knack of fluent, grace-
ful writing was his. The easy style was the result of con-
scientious toil. Genius there was, or else we should have
had no such result, but the closer study of Herodotus shows
what a close student he himself was. The very dialect in
which he wrote was a work of art, as unreal, as ideal, if you
choose, as modern literary Provencal, and the old-fashioned
style, as it is called by the Greek critics, was deliberately
adopted or deliberately retained. The Ionic dialect was the
first dialect used for artistic prose, and its charm was felt long
after the common speech of Greece had swept away all lit-
erary rivals, so that in the time of the Greek Renascence
scholars composed in Ionic and tried to reproduce the easy
pace of the dialect, with its wealth of vowels and its drawling
utterance. A great mass of medical literature bearing the
name of Hippocrates was written in Ionic ; the dark and
deep sayings of Heraclitus were couched in Ionic; the great
thinker Democritus was a master of Ionic style ; but Herodo-
tus evolved an Ionic of his own, and his Ionic became the
type, though his imitators did not appreciate either his depth
or his grandeur, did not feel the bowstring of tragedy in the
i