The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

148 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS LECT.

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impress upon it. But within the limits of the task
he attempted Thucydides was a master in the craft
of investigating contemporary events, and it may
be doubted whether within those limits the nineteenth century would have much to teach him. If
he had admitted his readers into the secrets of his
workshop, if he had more clearly displayed his raw
material and shown how he arrived at his conclusion, if he had argued and discussed, he might have
exercised a greater influence than he did on the
methods of subsequent Greek historians. His incomplete work, posthumously published, had an
immediate and far-reaching result in establishing
political history; and in the next lecture we shall
see how men of the younger generation received a
stimulus from him. But, although the value and
greatness of his work were at once recognised,
and he always remained the one and undisputed
authority on the period he had treated, yet, for
several centuries after his immediate successors,
his history seems to have been little read except
by scholars; he was a great name, not a living
influence as a teacher or a model. His style, with
its " old-fashioned and wilful beauty,"' repelled, and
other ideals of history, sharply opposed to his,
came into fashion. It was not till the first century
B.C., with the return to Attic models, that the
interest in his work revived; and from that time
we can trace his influence on leading writers2 down

1 apXa'Kov re Kal aciaseS KaXXos, Dionysius,,repi ovvO. or. 165.
2 Dexippus and Procopius are instances.