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

IIl

THUCYDIDES

103

sheer historical insight and grasp. Rising with
easy mastery over the mass of legends and details
which constituted the ill-ordered store of Greek
tradition, he constructs a reasoned march of
development, furnishing the proofs of his conclusions. He draws broad lines of historical
growth, elicits general and essential facts from
the multitude of particulars, and characterizes
periods by their salient features. He calls attention to the importance of considering conditions
of culture, and suggests the text for a history of
Greek civilisation. He turns the daylight of
material conditions' on the mythical period, and
discovers in the want of resources the key to
certain sides of the development of Hellas.
He accepts, of course, like Herodotus and every
one else, the actual existence of heroes such as
Pelops, Agamemnon, Minos, for whom the
genealogies seemed to vouch.' He did not
question the fact of the Trojan war; but he
1 He takes a matter-of-fact account of the establishment of the Pelopid
dynasty in Argolis from some previous writer, i. 9. 2 Xbyovo-t Keal ot
Tr& acpeTrara IleXoirovvxi]Lwv uv'7xjiy Trap& rAc 7rporepov &desey/jvoi (where
IleXowrovv7riwv depends on ol). A Peloponnesian on ancient Argive
history suggests Acusilaus. We should expect a man interested in
history like Thucydides to have read all or most of the historical works
which then existed. The only particular works he mentions (besides
Homer) are the rvyypa/A, 'ArTTLK of Hellanicus and the Apology of
Antiphon; but he refers generally to the works of poets and prose
writers (Xo-yoypaiot, i. 21) on early Greece, and of prose writers he was
here thinking chiefly of Herodotus, whom he admittedly criticizes elsewhere. It has been conjectured with much probability that in writing
the early chapters of Book vi. on the colonisation of Sicily he used the
history of Antiochus of Syracuse (Wolfflin). He cannot have failed to
know the books of Ion of Chios and Stesimbrotus, which must have been
read with avidity at Athens.