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

66 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS LECT.

Something more particular must be said about
the Herodotean story of the Persian invasion. A
self-flattering version of the war had become a
tradition at Athens. We have an early sketch of
it, in a poetical form, in the Persae of Aeschylus
(472 B.c.); but Herodotus was probably the first
to write it down in a historical form, some twenty
years later. Oral traditions (gathered at Athens,
Sparta, Delphi, and elsewhere) appear profusely in
his work, as every one knows. But he could not
have constructed his history of the course of the
war from oral traditions alone, or composed such
a narrative of events, in which he was too young
to take part, thirty years or so afterwards, without
the help of some earlier record. We have seen
that he depended on Hecataeus for Egypt, though
this was just one of the portions of his work where
autopsy, and information collected orally, might
have sufficed. There is little doubt that Hecataeus
was his main guide for early oriental history, and
that the same writer was also used for the descriptions of Scythia and Libya, along with other
geographical works of the Ionian school. When
we come to the invasion of Darius and Xerxes, we
find, as we might expect, clear indications that
Herodotus here too had a written guide. Throughout the narrative, in the last three Books, of the
events after Marathon to the end of the second
invasion, the historian has naturally to pass backwards and forwards from the Persians to the
Greeks. Now there is a remarkable contrast