Chapter 5 No.5

The Great Historians.

Herodotus and Thucydides 91

Herodotus superior in subject 92

Narrow scope of Thucydides 92

His deliberate omissions 93

supplied by inferior historians 93

Diodorus 93

Date of the destruction of Mycen? 94

Silence of ?schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides 94

Value of Plutarch's Lives 95

The newly-found tract on The Polity of the Athenians 96

Effects of Thucydides' literary genius 97

The Peloponnesian war of no world-wide consequence 97

No representation in Greek assemblies 98

No outlying members save Athenian citizens settled in subject towns 99

Similar defect in the Roman Republic 99

Hence an extended Athenian empire not maintainable 99

The glamour of Thucydides 100

His calmness assumed 101

He is backed by the scholastic interest 101

on account of his grammatical difficulties 102

He remains the special property of critical scholars 102

Herodotus underrated in comparison 103

The critics of Thucydides 103

The Anabasis of Xenophon 104

The weakness of Persia long recognized 105

Reception of the Ten Thousand on their return 105

The army dispersed 106

Xenophon's strategy 106

His real strategy was literary 107

A special favourite of Grote 107

Xenophon on Agesilaus and Epaminondas 108

Injustice of the Hellenica 108

Yet Xenophon is deservedly popular 109