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

64 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS LECT.

listened to it is a conjecture of Eduard Meyer,
which has some plausibility, since we find that a
famous picturesque phrase used by the orator,
likening the dead soldiers to the spring taken out
of the year, was adopted by the historian and
placed in a new setting.'
Admiration for the Athenian empire in the
third quarter of the fifth century meant admiration
for Pericles, the chief inspirer of Athenian policy,
and the sympathy of Herodotus with Pericles is
revealed in the single passage in which he mentions
him, where he records the anecdote of his mother's
dream that a lion would be born to her.2 It is
revealed, too, in sympathy with the Alemaeonid
family.3
His strong phil-Athenian feelings cannot be
disconnected from his tone of prejudice and disparagement in treating the Ionians. When the
immediate danger of Persian subjection was over,
and the Ionian cities which had been leagued with
Athens as an equal were brought to submit to
her as a mistress, there was little love lost. The
Ionian record of the war was one which would
have failed to satisfy Athenian patriots as certainly

-j &
~f. ~. -

1 vii. 162. 2 vi. 121.
3 v. 71 rests on the Alcmaeonid tradition. It has been suggested
that this sympathy of Herodotus may explain his curious treatment of
Themistocles. To this statesman Athens chiefly owed the decisive r6le
she played in the war, and though his good counsels are recognised, he is
also treated in an unfriendly spirit of detraction, and represented as an
intriguer rather than as a statesman. This looks as if the memory of
Themistocles were under a cloud, and this partial obscuration were
reflected in Herodotus. Afterwards, Thucydides made a point of doing
him justice.