Literature of the world : an introductory study . and he to the third; thus the in-fant, being handed from one to another, passedthrough the hands of all the ten, and not one ofthem was willing to destroy it. Having thereforedelivered the child again to its mother, and gone out, they stood at thedoor, and attacked each other with mutual recriminations.^ The result was that the child was hidden in a corn bin and lived tobe ruler of Corinth. Thucydides (c. 471-c. 400 ). The great work of Thucydideswas his History of the Peloponnesian War. He described it as aneyewitness. Indeed, he was a par
Literature of the world : an introductory study . and he to the third; thus the in-fant, being handed from one to another, passedthrough the hands of all the ten, and not one ofthem was willing to destroy it. Having thereforedelivered the child again to its mother, and gone out, they stood at thedoor, and attacked each other with mutual recriminations.^ The result was that the child was hidden in a corn bin and lived tobe ruler of Corinth. Thucydides (c. 471-c. 400 ). The great work of Thucydideswas his History of the Peloponnesian War. He described it as aneyewitness. Indeed, he was a participant, for in 424 b. c. he was incommand of a fleet of Athenian ships which met with disaster at thehands of the Spartans. As a consequence he lived in exile for twentyjears. The History of Thucydides is in eight books, the last ofwhich breaks off abruptly in the middle of a chapter describing theevents of the year 411. As a historian he is a great distanceremoved from Herodotus. He is more logical and intellectual1 Translation by Henry HERODOTUS 96 LITERATURE OF THE WORLD and more of a thinker; he is less interested in divine than he isin human agencies in history. Thucydides selected the Pelopon-ncsian War as his theme, since he deemed it the greatest event thathad affected all Greece, and since he could write as a the first scientific historian, he seeks the essential causes ofevents; he writes with perfect dispassionateness. Oratory appealsto him; hence his history introduces many set speeches deliveredby historical personages. Of the numerous vivid passages the bestknown, perhaps, are Pericles funeral oration and the descriptionsof the plague at Athens in 430 b. c. and of the ill-fated expeditionagainst Sicily in 413. Xenophon ( ). The third of the leading Greekhistorians was a man of practical bent and of active life. In hisyouth he knew Socrates, and in due time wrote the Memorabilia,a work in defense of the great master. In the y
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