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Here the author would willingly conclude his preface, but whilst the present work has been passing through the press, a new attempt has been made to assail the credibility of Herodotus, and to detract from his renown as a traveller and historian. The genius of the great father of history has preserved his writings nearly intact for twenty-three centuries; whilst his character for integrity has outlived the attacks of every discontented critic from Plutarch to Voltaire. His present assailant, Mr. Blakesley, is a scholar of a very different stamp from his predecessors. Actuated by no mean jealousy, and yielding to the influence of no scornful wit, he has been led by a profound love for abstract truth to pronounce somewhat too harshly against the straightforward narrative of the old Ionian. That much of Herodotus's information is only to be received as secondary evidence, will be readily admitted by all; but Mr. Blakesley would regard him as a mere pleasing compiler, like Oliver Goldsmith; prevented from travelling by the exigencies of the time, and differing but very little, if at all, from the logographers who preceded him either in critical sagacity, diligent investigation, or historical fidelity; blending together in one mass the yarns of merchant skippers, the tales current in caravanserais, the legends of the exegetae of temples, and the long details of veteran sailors and septuagenarian hoplites; exercising but little discrimination in the selection of his facts, careless in stating his authorities,

1 Herodotus, with a Commentary, by J. W. Blakesley, B. D., 2 vols. 8vo, London, 1854. It is to the Introduction in this work that the reader is more particularly referred.

laying claim to more experience and personal research than he was entitled, and, in fact, belonging to the same school as Charon, Hellanicus, Xanthus, Hecataeus, and others, from whom he largely copied without acknowledgment, and only exhibited perhaps a doubtful superiority in the style and treatment of his materials.

Mr. Blakesley's reasons for these inferences are by no means satisfactory. They are three in number. First, he asserts that the horror of the Greeks at originality, and their attachment to the social, political, and religious institutions in which they had been brought up, would have prevented even an intelligent and sagacious author, like Herodotus, from exercising the same kind of discrimination. which we should look for in a modern historian. Secondly, he quotes doubtful passages from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, from Strabo, and from Thucydides, to prove that the successors of Herodotus only regarded him as a logographer, like his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. Thirdly, he rakes up the old accusation of Porphyry, that Herodotus has taken his descriptions of the crocodile, hippopotamus, and phoenix picture almost literally from the Periegesis of Hecataeus, and yet leaves his readers to infer that he had himself seen those objects, and was describing them as an eye-witness. These three reasons must be reviewed in detail.

First, as regards the Greek abhorrence of originality, and their attachment to their traditions, social, political, and religious. Herodotus flourished about B. c. 450. As far as concerns literature and the arts, the previous age had been marked by striking changes.

The real glory of the ancient epic had passed away with the hereditary monarchies. The poet no longer sung, in solemn and majestic hexameters, the heroic deeds of the ancestors of reigning princes. He sprung into new and independent life. He came before the people as a man with thoughts and objects of his own, and expressed himself in new and livelier metres. Hence arose the feeling elegy, the satirical iambus, the fable and the parody, and last of all the impassioned and impetuous lyric. Music had undergone similar changes. Terpander had added three strings to the harp; Olympus had taught fresh tunes for the flute. Choral singing and dancing had become more finished, more elaborate, and more significant. Sculpture had likewise reached its culminating point in the sublime and mighty works of Phidias; the archaic had everywhere given way to the ideal. Painting was also fully developed by Polygnotus, and established as an independent art. Last of all, in the generation immediately preceding the birth of Herodotus, two still more important changes had taken place; the ancient epic had ripened into prose history; the iambic, lyric, and chorus were transformed into the mighty drama. The social customs of the people had undergone similar variations. The manners and usages of the heroic age were essentially different from those in the historic times. At Athens the men had left off wearing armour, and had become luxurious; and again, shortly before the Peloponnesian War, the elders had discarded their linen tunics and golden grasshoppers. The female fashions were no doubt as

1 Thucyd. i. 6.

changeable at Corinth and Ephesus as they now are at Paris; and it is certain that the more correct ladies of Athens wore first of all the Dorian chiton clasped to the shoulder, then, during the Persian war, the long and sleeved Ionian chiton,' and lastly, in the age of Pericles, returned once more to the Dorian costume.2 In politics, the Greeks in the time of Herodotus seem to have only exhibited their attachment to their political traditions, by a succession of political revolutions. Oligarchies, tyrannies, and democracies were by turns adopted in every city; and Herodotus himself having assisted in overthrowing the tyranny in Halicarnassus, fled from his ungrateful countrymen to seek for calm retirement at the distant settlement of Thurium. The religion of the Greeks had likewise passed through considerable modifications. The religious conceptions of Hesiod are far higher than those of Homer, whilst those of Aeschylus are still more lofty and spiritual. In Herodotus himself, who was undoubtedly a very religious man, we find a decided tendency to interpret the ancient mythes on rationalistic principles. In fact, free-thinking was already exercising considerable influence. The philosophers of Ionia, where Herodotus passed his youth, and of southern Italy, where he spent his declining years, were all, more or less, rejecting the popular notions of religion, and striking into new paths of speculation on sacred things. In short, a far greater degree of originality than that supposed by modern criticism to be evinced by Herodotus, was exhibited

1 Herod. v. 87, 88.

2 See the Excursus on Dress, in Becker's Charicles.

b

in almost every direction; and it may be easily inferred that the Ionian Greeks generally, like the Athenians in the days of St. Paul, spent a large proportion of their leisure time either in hearing or in telling of some new thing.

in

Secondly, the passages quoted by Mr. Blakesley to prove that Herodotus was not more faithful or industrious than his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, really prove nothing at all. The description of the ancient Greek historians by Dionysius of Halicarnassus points entirely, as Mr. Blakesley himself observes, "to the superior artistical skill which Herodotus displays in the choice of his subject, and the manner of treating it." The quotation from Strabo only proves that that geographer, like many later critics, was not disposed to put much faith in the stories of Herodotus. The passage Thucydides requires a moment's notice. Thucydides, in comparing his own work with those of previous historians who sought for attractive language rather than truth,' is supposed by Mr. Blakesley to refer most undoubtedly to Herodotus. Thucydides however, in another passage, seems to have the same historians in his eye when he complains of the mistake made in supposing that Hipparchus, and not Hippias, had succeeded Pisistratus in the tyranny; a mistake which was certainly not made by Herodotus. Indeed there is no reason for believing that Thucydides had ever read the history of Herodotus at all; he neither mentions his name in any part of his work, nor gives the slightest indication of being acquainted with either his life or labours.

1 Thucyd. i. 21.

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