The histories of Herodotus;

HERODOTUS xvii
silken cord of his narrative. The naivete of Herodotus, so
much emphasized by those who have not penetrated into his
real character, does not show itself in his language, which
was not learned in the streets of Halicarnassus or picked up
on the island of Samos. It is a composite diction of his own,
and one of the hardest tasks of modern Hellenists has been
set by the historian's dialect. The personal equation disarranges
the most elaborate schemes of the uniformitarian. Now
the breath of Attic blows on the vowels, now there is a remi-
niscence of Homer and Panyassis. To the vocal charm of the
dialect is added the delight of the transparent style, the sim-
ple structure of the sentence, and its pellucid flow. Rhetoric
had made considerable advance in the time of Herodotus,
and he was no stranger to the periodic style, with its elaborate
framework, with its protasis and apodosis, its problem and its
answer, and the gathered power of its circuit. But he delib-
erately preferred the older type, the so-called strung-on style
(\e|-45 eipofiev7)\ or rosary style, in which a simple and, a sim-
ple but, serves as a special bead to co-ordinate the groups of
words. The freedom with which the Greek can handle his
participles enables him to give colour and shade to the sen-
tence without the use of analytic conjunctions. The reader,
or, better, the listener, is left to draw his own inferences, to
make his own perspective, and the tide of the narrative moves
on full and yet free. This artistic use of the " strung-on "
style in narrative has been misunderstood, as so much has
been misunderstood in Herodotus, whose art only too effect-
ually conceals his art.
Whether we attach much importance or not to the story
of Herodotus's recitation at Athens, and if we put aside, as
we must put aside, the fable of his reading at Olympia and
elsewhere, unquestioned is the fact that his work became im-
mediately famous. Thucydides, who is but little younger,
treats him as a celebrity of the old school, and girds at him
covertly with a sense of superiority. Ctesias's " History of
Persia" was a formal assault on Herodotus, with the result
that in the age of facile sneer the world seemed richer by an-