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

II

HERODOTUS

57

they showed consummate felicity in constructing
stories with historical background, historical actors,
historical motives, and possessing, many of them,
a perpetual value because they are seasoned with
worldly wisdom and enshrine some criticism of life.
These tales differ from the old myths not only in
the tendency to point a moral, but also in the
circumstance that for the most part they do not
involve physical impossibilities, though they may
imply highly improbable coincidences, or what we
may call psychical or political impossibilities. The
work of Herodotus is richly furnished with these
tales; he had a wonderful flair for a good story;
and the gracious garrulity with which he tells historical anecdotes is one of the charms which will
secure him readers till the world's end. Gibbon
happily observed that Herodotus "sometimes
writes for children and sometimes for philosophers"; the anecdotes he relates often appeal
to both. He accepts them generally at their face
value, and most of them have been taken as more
or less literally true till very recent times. The
story of the intercourse between Croesus and
Solon was rejected as fiction only because it seemed
impossible to reconcile it with chronology.1 But
we are now more sceptical about good stories of
this type, and we have come to see how often they
1 It may be held, however, that this is still an open question. A
fragment of an anonymous Dialogue, discovered by Grenfell and Hunt
(Otyrhynchius Papyri, iv. No. 664), represents Solon as in Ionia when
Peisistratus became tyrant (560 B.c.). If this were so, the meeting with
Croesus would become chronologically possible.