INTRODUCTION: THE HISTORICAL CREDIBILITY OF HÊRODOTOS

Summary

Whether it was that the work of Hêrodotos fell upon an age which had imbibed the sceptical teaching of the philosophers and sophists, and, like the wits at the court of the Restoration, was ready to laugh down a writer who made demands upon its credulity,—or whether his residence in the West lost him the literary friends and advocates he would otherwise have had in Greece,—or whether, again, his partiality for Athens aroused the prejudices of the younger generation which gathered like vultures round the carcase of Athenian greatness, and neither cared nor desired to remember the history of the Persian wars,—certain it is that from the first Herodotos met with hostile criticism and accusations of historical dishonesty. Hardly had the generation for whom he wrote passed away before Thukydidês tacitly accused him of errors which the Attic historian corrected without even naming the author to whom they were due. While his statements on matters of Greek history were thus called in question by a writer of that very nationality whose deeds he had done so much to exalt, his history of the East was categorically declared to be false by Ktêsias, the physician of the Persian king Artaxerxes Mnêmon. Born at Knidos, almost within sight of Halikarnassos, the birthplace of Herodotos, the position of Ktêsias gave him exceptional opportunities for ascertaining the true facts of Persian history, and his contemporaries naturally concluded that a critic who had lived long at the Persian Court, and had there consulted the parchment archives of Persia, was better informed than a mere tourist whose travels had never extended so far as the Persian capital, and who was obliged to depend upon ignorant dragomen for the information he retailed.