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

CHARON AND DIONYSIUS

23

the history of Greece at almost any period without
dissipating the interest is a task of immense difficulty, as any one knows who has tried, because
there is no constant unity or fixed centre to which
the actions and aims of the numerous states can be
subordinated or related. Even in the case of the
Persian invasion, one of the few occasions on
which most of the Greek cities were affected by
a common interest, though acting in various ways
and from various motives, it facilitated the task of
the narrator to polarise the events of the campaigns by following the camp of the invader and
describing them as part of Persian history, though
with Hellenic sympathy. But this method of
treatment was a heritage from Hecataeus. The
impulse which led to the "Persian" books of
Charon and Dionysius came from the geographical
work of Hecataeus, and in all probability he was
one of their chief guides for oriental history up to
the Ionic revolt.
There is one other observation I would make
about the lost history of Dionysius. He was an
Ionian, writing after Ionia had been delivered from
the Persian yoke and had entered the confederacy
of Delos, with the prospect of becoming dependent
on Athens. The history of Ionia had not been
brilliant, politically, during the past hundred years.
It had been subdued first by Lydia and then by
Persia; it had revolted from Persia and ignominiously failed; it had been compelled to aid its
master in attempting to enslave the free Hellenes.