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

152 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS LECT.

would have written the life of some mediocre
hero of the stamp of Agesilaus. So far as
history is concerned, his true vocation was to
write memoirs. The Anabasis is a memoir, and
it is the most successful of his works. It has the
defects which memoirs usually have, but it has
the merits, the freshness, the human interest of
a personal document. The adventures of the Ten
Thousand are alive for ever in Xenophon's pages.
He took up the story of the Peloponnesian war
where Thucydides had left it, and he carried down
the history of Greece from that date to the fall
of the Theban supremacy, in the work which we
know as the Hellenica. By this work his powers
as a historian must be judged. Some of its
characteristics are due to the superficial lessons
which the author learned from the founder of
political history. In the first portion of the book'
he employed strictly the annalistic plan of Thucydides. He adopted the device of introducing
speeches, and the objective method of allowing the
actors to reveal themselves in their acts and words.
He does not himself pourtray their characters, as he
pourtrays Cyrus and the generals in the Anabasis.
But he never goes down below the surface of
events; he never analyses the deeper motives; and
he writes with little disguise of his own predilections.
His history is an apotheosis of Agesilaus; he does
not conceal his strong philo-Laconian leanings or
his hatred of Thebes; he pointedly ignores Epami

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1 B. i. and B. ii. to iii. 10.