[Toynbee was an eminent English sociologist and economist. In the following excerpt from his work on Greek historians, he argues that the writers included in this category were neither, by and large, solely Greek, nor only historians, because they also contributed to other genres.]

Ancient Greek or Hellenic historical thought began at the moment when the first rudiments of the poetry of Homer shaped themselves in Greek minds. It came to an end when Homer yielded precedence to the Bible as the sacred book of a Greek-speaking and Greek-writing intelligentzia. In the series of historical authors the latter event occurred between the dates at which Theophylactus Simocatta and George of Pisidia produced their respective works.… A historical process, however, seldom takes place abruptly, and the transition from Hellenic to Byzantine civilisation (of which this literary revolution was one sympton among many) occupied from first to last a period of fully three centuries. This becomes evident as soon as we bring other aspects of life into our field of vision. Paulus, for example, an Imperial Groom of the Bedchamber and a confrère of his contemporary the historian Agathias in the art of minor poetry, was still able in the sixth century after Christ to write with ease in the language and metre of Mimnermus; but the subject of his longest and most celebrated poem is the Church of Agia Sofia— the masterpiece of an architecture antithetical in almost every feature to any Hellenic monument of Colophon or Ephesus or Athens. The change declares itself simultaneously in the field of Religion. The creed, at once primitive and profound, of Pride, Doom and the Envy of the Gods is characteristic of the Hellenic outlook upon life. It appears already articulated in the earliest strata of Homer.… The spirit of this specifically Hellenic religion is unmistakable in all the literature which it pervades; but an examination of the passage entitled "Agnosticism" which has been translated from Agathias's immediate predecessor Procopius reveals the fact that by the middle of the sixth century after Christ Hellenic religion was extinct—even in the hearts of men who had been educated in the Hellenic literary tradition and who still paid lip-service to the Hellenic gods. In a rather pedantic reminiscence of a Herodotean mannerism, Procopius refrains from discussing the arcana of contemporary Christian controversy on the ground that the subjects professedly in dispute are by their nature incomprehensible to the human reason, and incidentally he propounds what to his mind are the bare axiomatic facts regarding the character of God. Yet anybody who has caught … the real religious outlook of Hellenism will see at once that Procopius's axioms would have appeared to Herodotus or Thucydides or Polybius to beg the fundamental questions of good and evil. Poor Procopius! How deeply he would have been mortified could he have realised that, in the estimation of his classical literary ensamples, his intellectual superciliousness would have stood him in no stead whatsoever, and that they would have classed him remorselessly with their reverences Hypatius and Demetrius, and with His Sacred Majesty Justinian himself, as a type croyant characteristic of his soft-headed age.

The Envy of the Gods was a serious matter to the Hellenes because they preferred to lay up their treasure where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal. Their kingdom was emphatically a kingdom of this world. Pericles exhorted his countrymen to let the greatness of Athens "fill," not "pass," their understanding; the "salvation" debated at Melos meant bodily escape from massacre or enslavement and not the release of the soul from guilt or perdition; the "Saviour" par excellence in the Hellenic tradition was Ptolemy, son of Lagus, who successfully abstracted that title from Zeus until he forfeited it to a proletarian descendant of his Oriental subjects; and the "sin" over which Polybius declined to draw a veil was the political folly by which Diaeus and his colleagues brought the Achaean Confederacy to ruin. In other words, the world of Hellenism (and herein lies its supreme interest for us) was a world like that in which we live to-day, by contrast with the Christian dispensation which in the chronological sense intervenes between us, or with that religion, yet unborn, which will undoubtedly lay up a new treasure in a new heaven as our world sinks, to founder at last like its predecessors in "the abyss where all things are incommensurable."

There is no space within the limits of this introduction to offer anything like a biographical index, however summary, of the historical authors whose works are represented in the text of the book; but one or two general observations may be an aid to interpretation. In the first place, the Hellenic historians (especially the greatest of them) were by no means purely Hellenic in race. Herodotus came from the bilingual Helleno-Carian community of Halicarnassus; Thucydides, although Athenian born and possessed (until his exile) of Athenian citizenship, had Thracian blood in his veins; Josephus was a Jew, Procopius a Philistine—though, from the age of Alexander onwards, it goes without saying that Hellenic historians were drawn from all the peoples among whom the Gospel of Hellenism was successively propagated. In this phase historical writing of the Hellenic school did not even confine itself to the vehicle of the Greek language.… The unparalleled political aggrandisement of Rome enabled Roman historians to group the world's affairs round the destinies of their own city-state; and therefore, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus pointed out, they tended to cultivate a particular branch of Hellenic historical literature: the local chronicle. From this point of view the Roman historians, like the Roman adaptors of the Athenian Comedy of Manners, offered us almost our only material for reconstructing a lost branch of Hellenic literature, until the recent discovery of the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens restored to us, in epitome, the local chronicle of the most interesting city-state in Hellas Proper. Thus, in history as in other spheres, the influence of Hellenism radiated far more widely than the Greek language or the Greek race; and that is one of the principal testimonies to its greatness.

At the same time, it is equally true that some of the most profound and most illuminating creations of Hellenic historical thought were inspired by contact with non-Hellenic societies. Herodotus's eyes were opened by his study of the Syro-Iranian civilisation embodied in the universal state of the Achaemenids, which in his time had attempted, and failed, to assimilate the Hellenic world. Polybius was similarly stimulated by the revelation of Roman Italy (with its broadening hinterland in the West) at a moment when Rome was achieving, in the military sense, what Persia had failed to do, while in every other department of life the victor was being carried captive by Hellenism. Polybius, who came from Megalopolis in the depths of Arcadia, was the only one of the three great historical geniuses of Hellenism who was a pure Hellene in the comparatively unimportant zoological sense of the word; but a civilisation, at any given moment of its existence, is never a mere product of physical transmission or local environment. It is a communion of saints (and of sinners) compassed about by that great and ever-increasing cloud of witnesses that have already joined the majority of mankind; and membership in it is therefore a matter of spiritual rather than of material affiliations. It is conceivable, for instance, that the fifteenth-century Athenian historian Laonīcus Chalcocondyles, who, in excellent classical Greek and in a style carefully modelled upon Herodotus and Thucydides, has recorded the rise of the Ottoman Empire, could have traced his genealogy to Erechtheus or Deucalion on both sides of the family more plausibly than Thucydides himself, or that he would have been found, if examined by a trained anthropologist, to exhibit a "more Hellenic" pigmentation, cephalic index and facial angle. Yet, for all that, Thucydides would retain his unchallenged supremacy as the greatest Hellenic historian, while Chalcocondyles would remain the ornament that he is to Byzantine—but not to Hellenic—civilisation. It would have been idle for Chalcocondyles and his Byzantine contemporaries of the Renaissance to protest that they had Deucalion to their father, when, two thousand years before, the Heavenly Muse had already raised up children to Deucalion out of the stones of Thrace and Caria.

It is a second characteristic of Hellenic historical thought that it was by no means exclusively the creation of professional historians. The poetry of different ages, as well as the philosophy of Plato and the medical literature of the Hippocratean School, have been laid under contribution in this book because they happen to have expressed certain fundamental Hellenic historical ideas more clearly than any work of history in the technical sense. Conversely, the historians have made many contributions to Romance, Genealogy, Anthropology and Physical Science.… Perhaps as much (to hazard a guess) as four-fifths of the total body of Hellenic historical writing that has reached us is occupied by detailed accounts of military operations— a curious fact, considering how intellectual, and speculatively intellectual, was the public for whom most works of Hellenic history were written.…

The features just mentioned are possibly not peculiar to Hellenic historical writing. It is more characteristic that, even when we narrow down our range of vision to the professional historians themselves, we find that the vast majority of them were men of the world. Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius and Josephus (four out of the five greatest figures) were all rising men of action with broken careers, who only turned their energies into a literary channel when the Envy of the Gods had deprived them of the opportunity to hold offices of state, to carry public business through political assemblies, or to command fleets or armies in the field. The private life of Herodotus, the fifth great figure, is hardly known to us. His Voltairean turn of mind suggests a born observer and critic rather than an instinctive participant in affairs; yet his intellectual work was always a living and a humane activity, because he studied contemporary history and sociology, and studied them from nature, in an extensive and adventurous series of travels. In other words, he took his observations with the eyes of Odysseus and not through the lenses of Ranke, and this is a distinctive note of the Hellenic Historical School. Polybius, again, travelled as extensively in the north-western as Herodotus had done in the south-eastern hinterland of the Hellenic world of his time; and Diodorus, whose work sometimes smells pungently of the lamp, was not content (as he tells us himself) to sit in libraries at Agyrium or even at Rome. In the case of historians who were fortunate enough to live during the Time of Growth or the Time of Troubles, this salutary intimacy with the active life of their society is not really surprising, unless by contrast with the phenomena of other civilisations. It is remarkable, however, to find that this feature did not disappear during the third and last phase, during which the Hellenic world lay more or less passive under the pall of the Pax Romana. In that age, at least, the academic historian might be expected to predominate; yet, even from the period of the Roman Empire, Dionysius and Eunapius are the only undoubted examples of the type who have found their way into the present volume. Arrian and Dio were soldiers and statesmen with as varied an experience of public life and of practical responsibilities as had ever fallen to the lot of a Xenophon or a Polybius. Herodian was probably a civil servant; Appian was either a civil servant or a member of the local aristocracy of Alexandria, which in his time still carried on the municipal administration; Marcus Diaconus was a practical (and on occasions exceedingly drastic) missionary; Priscus was a barrister, and so likewise were Procopius, Agathias and Menander, the three notable figures from the sixth century after Christ. The Bar was the last liberal profession that held out against the disintegration of Hellenic society; and, although Agathias might complain that it left him too little leisure for his historical studies, we may feel less sorry for him when we contemplate the use to which unchastened leisure was put by his successor Simocatta.

After this brief discussion of the Hellenic historians and of the world in which they lived, it may be well to close with a word upon methods of translation. In the present translator's view, the capital and almost irreparable error to be avoided by a modern Western mind in approaching any branch of Hellenic literature is to allow itself to be dominated by the thought that all this was done and felt and written between two and three thousand years ago—as though chronological antiquity implied, in this case, any corresponding naïveté or poverty of experience. The fact is that the relation in which we consciously stand to our own Western predecessors of three or six or twelve centuries ago has hardly any analogy to our relations with members of other civilisations, even though the life-history of those civilisations may in the chronological sense be previous to ours. In spite of such chronological priority, the remote past embodied in foreign civilisations may be subjectively nearer to the life of our own day than is the recent past out of which our life has arisen. In other words, chronological priority and posteriority have little or no subjective significance except within the single span of a given civilisation, while, in comparing the histories of different civilisations, the direct chronological relation between them is an almost irrelevant, and therefore usually misleading, factor. In the philosophical sense, all civilisations have been and are and will continue to be contemporaneous with one another. They are all the offspring of the same family in the same generation, and the differences of age between them are infinitesimal in comparison with the immense period during which the human family had existed before any civilisation was born. Therefore, in attempting to find an equation between two independent civilisations (and that is what translation from Ancient Greek into Modern English ultimately means) it may be a not unprofitable exercise of the fancy to date in some approximate and conventional way their respective starting-points, measure the chronological interval between these, and then subtract the amount of that interval in order to discover the century in the chronologically earlier civilisation to which any given century in the later civilisation corresponds from this point of view. For example, if we take 1125 B.C. as a conventional year for Hellenism, in which Hellenic civilisation began to emerge out of the wreckage of the shattered Minoan world, and A.D. 675 as a conventional year of a similar kind for the West, in which Western civilisation began to emerge out of the wreckage of Hellenism (in its Roman extension), we shall estimate at something like 1800 years the chronological interval between Hellenic and Western history which has always to be eliminated in order to find their correspondence, at any given stage, as measured from their respective starting-points. It is hardly necessary to say that this is not intended as a historical dogma, but merely as a suggestion for arriving at a method of comparative study. By the aid of this fanciful measuring-rod we can ascertain which Hellenic and which Western generations were "contemporary" with one another in the sense that they were separated from their respective starting-points by an equal period of time, and therefore possessed at any rate a quantitatively (though by no means necessarily a qualitatively) equal fund of traditional experience or social heritage in the various fields of economics, politics, literature, art, religion and the rest. With this magic wand in our hands, we may amuse ourselves by translating (say) Plutarch himself, and not merely Plutarch's writings, from the Hellenic world into ours; and if we do so, we shall find that Plutarch would have been born in 1846 and would be destined to die in 1925 as a last grand survivor of the Victorians! If there is any significance at all in this, we cannot expect to appreciate Plutarch so long as we insist upon reading him in Langhorne's translation, or to reproduce him to our own satisfaction so long as we interlard our modern translation with Elizabethan tags until we have compounded a hotch-potch of "translationese" unlike any living piece of literature of our own age or any other. A fortiori, we cannot defend such false archaism in the case of authors who, if magically translated in person into our own world, would at this moment be either still unborn or in their early infancy. Marcus Aurelius, for example, would be not yet four yearsold, and would be able to look forward to living until 1980. May the Envy of the Gods spare our own children born into this Western World in 1921 from so melancholy a view of human life as their great Hellenic contemporary's!

What is the bearing of this suggested parallelism upon the translation of literature? At first sight it might appear as though we ought to translate Marcus and Plutarch into the literary English (or French or German or Italian or whatever our particular Western vernacular may be) that is being written in our own generation, and then clothe their predecessors, phase by phase, in the corresponding styles of our own literary background— maintaining the same interval of approximately eighteen centuries throughout the process. As soon, however, as we attempt to think this programme out, the obstacles become apparent. In the first place, the "curves" of Western and Hellenic history do not correspond. In Hellenic the highest peak was reached (and never again equalled) during the two centuries between the years 525 and 325 B.C., which were contemporaneous (on our fanciful scheme of measurement) with the two centuries between A.D. 1275 and 1475 in the West. In our case, however, that period, though it marked a secondary peak in the life of Northern and Central Italy, was far from being the zenith in the entire lifehistory of the whole society. The West, as a whole, rose to greater heights of self-expression (or, as Pericles might have put it, "raised more imperishable monuments of its presence for good or evil") between about the year 1775 and the European War; while, in contrast, the equivalent period of Hellenic history (25 B.C.-A.D. 114) fell wholly within the latest phase of Hellenic life, during which a world stricken to death by four centuries of troubles was attempting a final rally before its inevitable dissolution. We who are still young in 1924 do not yet pretend to know whether the West has just (though only just) begun to descend on its long journey ad tartara leti, whereas Plutarch in his old age must have known for certain, deep down in his heart (though he may never have admitted it with his intellect), that Hellas was already far advanced upon the downward road. Therefore we, with several more chapters of progress and several fewer of decline behind us than were present to Plutarch's consciousness, are bound to look back upon our predecessors with different eyes. The Hellenic mediaeval world of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. was not only more mature and more triumphant in actual fact than the Western mediaeval world of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of our era, but its proportions were inevitably exaggerated in the eyes of Plutarch's generation by contrast with their own lassitude and timidity. To our modern mental vision, on the contrary, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (even as embodied in their Italian representatives) bear the stamp of what we either disparage as "immature" or praise as "primitive." There are elements in them, and noble elements, of which we may feel and regret the absence in ourselves; but as a whole we cannot take them quite seriously or treat their children, our predecessors, as men quite on a mental level with ourselves. We cannot even affect to do so without a certain consciousness of insincerity. Contrast with this the attitude of Plutarch and Dionysius towards Herodotus and Thucydides respectively. First, they approached their mediaeval predecessors in an attitude of adoration, as exponents of no longer attainable and almost lost ideals; and then, in the second place, they were cruelly dazzled at close quarters by the clouds of glory with which these Titans had been transfigured by their Olympian visions. "And when he came down from the mount, Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him. And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come nigh him." Did Moses's punier countrymen resent as well as fear the light which repelled them? Dionysius and Plutarch, in the same situation, were utterly unable to conceal the aversion and dismay with which the "hard gem-like flame" of a Herodotus or a Thucydides inspired them. Devoted as they and all their finest contemporaries were to nursing the old age of Hellas, smoothing the ever-recurring wrinkles from her brow, stilling her fevered movements, checking her delirium and directing her thoughts (when living thoughts still flitted across her brain) away from the formidable future towards a golden or a gilded past, they could no longer bear to meet face to face the strong men armed who had loved Hellas and laughed with her and seen her as she was and beheld that she was both very good and very evil, and therefore altogether human, in the irrevocable years when Hellas and her sons were still young together. No, the Hellenes of the Empire could not face the Hellenes of the Fifty Years, with their fearless intellectual curiosity, their instinctive and effortless faculty for looking truth in the face, and their consciousness of superfluous strength which gave them the heart to be humorous or sardonic in due season. That is the pathos of all archaism. It is flustered and put out of countenance whenever it ventures to look its professed models in the face.

This means that the translation of each Hellenic phase of thought and style into an equivalent Western phase would be an historical impossibility, even to a scholar endowed with a very much finer sense of language than is possessed by the present translator. Nor, if the impossible could be achieved, should we unquestionably profit by the result; for in so far as we succeeded in translating the past of Hellenic literature into the past of our own, we should be almost wantonly putting it out of focus for our modern vision. Our Western literary heritage is, in fact, the one domain of literature which is essentially "untranslatable" into the Western style of to-day. The moment that we attempt to modernise a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century work of English literary art, the charm of sentiment and association, and therewith most of the beauty, vanishes as if by magic; while, on the other hand, when we try to yield our fancies up to the undesecrated original, we are often conscious that other elements in the essence escape us, and that the very iridescence of "Elizabethan" quaintness and age (like the colours on Roman glass) spreads a fog of obscurity between our minds and the minds by whom and for whom the original truth and beauty was created. It was created in a living present by living men, into whose appreciation of it no tinge of archaism entered at the creative moment; and for this reason it is virtually impossible to establish a perfect spiritual communion between us and them. It would therefore surely be mistaken from a practical point of view, even if it were possible, to translate the work of other civilisations into a form so elusive to our own powers of apprehension, while theoretically, likewise, it might well be wrong. After all, are any products of Hellenic literature immature or primitive or naïve or archaic when regarded as they really are, without the qualifying and distorting consciousness that they were brought into existence so many hundreds of years ago? The vague notion of Herodotus among modern Western readers as a simple-minded "Father of History" would have filled a Dionysius or a Plutarch with amazement. The traditional title of honour ought to be a sufficient warning in itself against the conception of its bearer with which it is usually associated among ourselves, for creation and innovation are achievements not of simple but of subtle and ruthless minds; and the subtlety and ruthlessness of Herodotus, presented in their nakedness, would undoubtedly shock many Western readers of to-day as deeply as they shocked the Hellenic public of the Empire. Nor, again, is naïveté characteristic of any stratum in Homer.…