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

218 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS LECT.

have a Polybian flavour, but we are bound to
believe him that he had always evidence to work
upon in their construction.
He was not indifferent to style; his care is
shown in his scrupulous avoidance of hiatus. It is
highly significant that in the Greek versions which
he made of the Latin texts of the treaties of Rome
with Carthage he neglected the rules of hiatus, the
observance of which would have embarrassed or
harmed the accuracy of the translation. He did
not, so far as we know, follow literary models. To
illustrate his diction and vocabulary we must look
not to belles lettres but to the language of officialdom -decrees and despatches - and technical
treatises on philosophy and science. Yet he had a
wide acquaintance with literature and the classical
poets. He quotes lyric poets, Pindar and Simonides, as well as Euripides. Like all educated Greeks,
he was familiar with Homer, and the fragments of
his thirty-fourth Book, which was concerned with
the geography of the West, show that he was interested in Homeric criticism. The question was
debated in ancient, as well as modern, times
whether there was any real geographical background to the adventures of Odysseus. Do the
islands of the Cyclops, of Circe, of Calypso, do
Scylla and Charybdis, correspond to actual places
on the Mediterranean coasts? Or are they "faery
lands forlorn," and is it vain to seek their names
on the traveller's chart? Eratosthenes held that
Homer had here created a world of poetical