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

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CRATIPPUS

157

even more so than Xenophon's Hellenica), not
compiled from books. We can see that it was
written without knowledge of Xenophon's work.
The lower limit of its date can hardly be later
than about 350 B.c.1 Now Cratippus, we know,
was a younger contemporary of Thucydides,2 and
his literary activity must have been subsequent
to the death of Thucydides (c. 396 B.C.) whose
work he continued; so that chronology as well as
subject accords with the hypothesis of his authorship. There are no speeches, and one of the
things we know about Cratippus is that he
disapproved of the speeches in Thucydides and
considered the absence of them in the last Book
a proof that Thucydides had come to regard them
as undesirable.3 The narrative is lucid and simple,
unadorned by rhetorical phrases and free from
didactic commonplaces. It is also extremely dull;
but it would be illegitimate to judge from this
particular section that the work as a whole could
not have evoked the praise implied by Plutarch.
If nothing were left to us of Thucydides but,
say, the last thirty chapters of the third Book,
with the tedious account of the Acarnanian operations of Demosthenes, what a dull writer we should
esteem him. We can see that the author was not
given to passing personal criticisms; no hard words
are said of any one; a slight approbation is accorded
to an act of Conon; and one much-mutilated
1 E. M. Walker thinks it was written before the end of the Phocian war.
2 Dionysius, De Thucydide, 16. 3 Ib.