[Here, de Sélincourt enumerates some of the main reasons why Greek tradition is comparatively poor in the area of history.]

Greek literature, the richest in the world after our own, Is comparatively poor in the department of history. Only two Greek historians have a title to greatness: Herodotus, first in time and incomparably the greater, and Thucydides. Xenophon, who continued the story of Greece where Thucydides left it, was a second-rate historian; he did indeed write one good book, his account—a splendid piece of first-hand reporting—of the expedition of a Greek mercenary army deep into the interior of Asia on a wild adventure in the service of the Persian prince, Cyrus; and he left some amiable tracts, in the manner of a country gentleman, on hunting and the management of an estate; but his major historical work few nowadays can bring themselves to read. Polybius, the fourth and last, was a writer of eminence, but though his long work included much Greek history, he was primarily a historian of Rome, telling the eventful story of her wars with Carthage. These four—unless we include Arrian, who wrote in the second century of our era a pious and competent history of Alexander the Great—complete the list of the Greek historians whose work has survived in anything but a fragmentary state and has quality above the mediocre.

Survival, indeed, is not a proof of quality, but it is some indication at least, and we can be pretty sure that neither accident nor time nor the judgement of the old Alexandrian scholars, has deprived us of any Greek histories of first-rate importance. Chroniclers of sec-ond—or fourth-rate-importance, and laborious compilers of historical facts and fictions, such as Diodorus the Sicilian who wrote a work in 144 books on world history from the Trojan War to the death of Julius Caesar, can be reckoned in hundreds; but to us these men themselves are not even names, and even of the hundreds I mentioned …, the great majority are little more than names. For the fact is that the brilliant lead of Herodotus and Thucydides was not followed. Herodotus, the Father of History, had an undistinguished family. This makes his own achievement only the more remarkable, as all the evidence forces us to the conclusion that historical writing of a high order was, unlike poetry, philosophy and the visual arts, in some way alien to the subtle and inventive genius of the Greeks. Poetry was in their blood: they were born poets, seeing what they saw with passion and immediacy, never, in the great early centuries before their decline, misting it with sentiment or wrapping it in rhetoric. They were born philosophers, too, with their devotion to first principles and insatiable curiosity about the workings of the sensible universe, of man in society and of their own minds; but they were not, it seems, by temperament or inclination, historians. Thus Herodotus, a native of Caria, part of that region on the Eastern shores of the Aegean where the first great impulse towards free speculation began in the sixth century before Christ—though a Greek of the Greeks in his habitual attitudes, and representative of much that was wisest and most civilised in that brilliant people whose civilisation was yet never separated by anything but the thinnest wall from savagery and barbarism, was nevertheless, in one important respect, untypical of his race. Homer (as we now believe) wrote the first great poem, and from that fount of poetry flowed innumerable streams. Men like Thales and Anaximander broke through the agel-ong darkness of superstition and the universal tyranny of myth to use their wits and their senses upon the fundamental problems of science and cosmology ('where does the visible universe come from, and how was it made?') and were followed throughout the six centuries of Greek intellectual pre-eminence by a succession of thinkers and speculators who built upon that priceless foundation of the freedom of thought; but Herodotus, who wrote the first great History in Greek, wrote also the last; Thucydides indeed, his younger contemporary, wrote a history which is still very much alive today and thus justifies its author's claim to make it a 'possession for ever'; but compared with Herodotus, Thucydides' book is tendentious in matter, parochial in scope, and difficult to read from the violences it does to the beautiful and perspicuous Greek language.

Homer, then, and the earliest Ionian thinkers, did what other Greeks with a similar intellectual endowment were potentially capable of doing, once they had been shown the way; Herodotus, on the contrary, did what others of his countrymen could never learn to do, or never wished to do. He was able (surely the first quality of a good historian) to see his subject as part of a larger process and to be constantly aware of the threads which linked his country with the vast and mysterious lands of Egypt and Asia. He was able to keep before his reader the sense that Greece, the centre of his interest, was still only one country in an immense and diverse world which it was yet to dominate by virtue of certain qualities which that world lacked, above all by that passion for independence and self-determination which was both her glory and her bane; to be aware of the past, not only the immediate but the most remote, as a living element in the present; and to find—unlike, in this, most historians writing today—a continuing moral pattern in the vicissitudes of human fortune all the world over. That pattern was simple enough: too simple for modern criticism, which tends to reject moral causes in tracing changes in the power-patterns of human society. It was formed from the belief that men, as men, are subject to certain limitations imposed by a Power—call it Fate or God—which they cannot fully comprehend, and that any attempt to transcend those limitations is met by inevitable punishment. In the search for a principle one might, after all, go farther and fare worse; such as it is, it has, in one form or another, lived on beside our newer notions. We still believe I suppose, that men are bound by the necessity of obedience. The only point of debate is obedience to what?

Perhaps I have suggested that the fact that Herodotus had no worthy successors during the period of Greek intellectual supremacy is a matter for surprise. This is not so. It is Herodotus himself who is surprising; for the study of history, in Herodotus' sense and in our own, was alien to the whole temper and circumstances of the ancient world. The priests in Egypt kept records stretching back to the remotest antiquity; but records are not history. Even the book of Thucydides, in many ways a noble one, is only an essay in history, dealing as it does, except for an introductory sketch, the validity of which has lately been called into question, only with contemporary events, and attempting the delineation, memorable indeed, of the contemporary political behaviour of men under the stresses of a civil war. But free and far-ranging inquiry into the past, either for its own intrinsic interest or in the search for a fuller understanding of the present, is an activity more natural to the modern than to the ancient world. Nor is this a question merely of techniques, which for Herodotus were almost totally non-existent; it is also, and predominantly, a question of the different direction of interest fostered by a comparatively primitive and a highly complex and artificial civilisation. The Greeks, most inquisitive of peoples, were not, on the whole, much interested in the past simply because they were too intensely occupied with the present. A civilisation like our own, though it liberates a man from many of the pressures of living, at the same time softens the impact of the basic realities. Perforce nowadays we live largely at second hand, not knowing, or wishing to know, the processes which supply our needs, and not understanding, or wishing to understand, even if we could, the evidence upon which most of our current beliefs rest. The enormous amount which we take on trust must be obvious to anyone. The ancient Greek world was a small world, in which a man counted for something: he counted for something even if the tiny community in which he lived was governed by a des-pot; for there was always the hope that an opportunity might arise to stick a knife into the despot and have a revolution. And because it was a small world, what went on in it came home to a man's business and bosom in a way which is hardly possible for us today. Moreover it was not afflicted with the curse, unavoidable in modern conditions, of departmentalism. Every man had his public duties to perform, at least in the democratic communities, as politician and soldier. The Greeks had a word for those who avoided these duties: the word was 'idiot'. To all this we can add the extreme uncertainty amongst the ancients of the physical bases of life, the imminence of death by hunger, disease or violence, and the continual internecine feuds between neighbouring communities and between rival political parties within the same community, the whole sunlit scene shading off into a spirit-haunted darkness and a horror of the unknown—conditions of living which the Greeks seem to have accepted sometimes with a fierce joy, sometimes with a gloomy resignation to life's inevitable ills. It is not hard to see why they had little inclination to bother themselves with the past. The present filled them, and, if they did look to the past, it was through legend and myth, mainly local and particular, by which a community might connect its origin with a divine founder or a family with a divine ancestor.

Another reason why the Greeks were comparatively poor in historical writing is that they had no sense of the general march or development of human society. This difference between the Greeks and ourselves is important, and not easy to grasp. Time, for us, has been enormously extended by modern accretions of knowledge; our ability by means of geology, anthropology and other sciences to see, however dimly, into its dark backward and abysm, has necessarily affected our views of the development of man during the comparatively brief period he has been upon this earth. Evolution, in one form or another, is a part of our common mental furniture, and even the notion of progress, so fervently entertained in the hopeful years of the later 19th century, is not yet dead. At any rate we still believe that humanity is moving somewhere, even if not towards a better state. The odd identification of progress with material improvement has had, no doubt, to be seriously questioned recently; but we still know that our species is on the march, and that is progress of a kind; for one cannot but march forward even when the road leads back. The Greeks, when they looked back at all, looked back to a mythical Golden Age, since when they had steadily declined; nor did they fancy that Golden Age as very different in essentials from their own, except that men then were, so to put it, better at being men. The heroes who so splendidly walked the earth, sometimes in company with the gods, were but heightened images of themselves— better fighters, lustier lovers, bigger eaters and drinkers able to consume whole chines of beef and swallow honey-sweet wine by the barrelful, cunninger thieves, like the god Hermes, more ingenious tricksters in love or war. In short, they were fine fellows compared with their degenerate children. But any conception of a movement of humanity from primitive savagery to civilisation was absent from Greek thought, and when they looked at the future the Greeks saw it in the same terms as the present. In the political thought of the classical period, the City-state, for instance, had come to stay; and stay it did, till Alexander the Great left it in ruins. It is amusing to remember that Aristotle, who was Alexander's tutor, and whose reputation as a philosopher is still, I suppose, as high as most, laid it down in his Politics that no state should ever consist of more than 100,000 people; elsewhere, I believe, he said that a really satisfactory community should be small enough to allow everyone to know everyone else by name. That lesson, at any rate, his young pupil did not learn.

Lastly, the Greeks in general were not very much interested in countries and civilisations other than their own. They were aware, indeed, that the world was full of men, but the men were of two kinds only: Greeks and barbarians. The word 'barbarian' is itself a measure of their lack of interest: it means people whose unintelligible lingo sounds to a Greek ear like bar-bar-bar—or to borrow a more agreeable and imaginative comparison from Herodotus, like the twittering of birds. Unlike the Romans, who spoke Greek familiarly, the Greeks never seem to have bothered to learn a foreign language.

Herodotus overcame the disabilities imposed by time and place with astonishing success. Anyone can read his book with pleasure and profit, but the magnitude of his achievement can be grasped only by an imaginative reconstruction of the circumstances in which it was written. He was the first European historian and remains, in many respects, amongst the greatest; he was also—an achievement hardly less important—the first European writer to use prose as an artistic medium. The art of Greek prose was Herodotus' invention. English literature began, fully grown, with Chaucer; but Herodotus' achievement was greater than Chaucer's, because, unlike the Englishman who built his work on the solid foundation of the already long tradition of European literature, Herodotus had nothing to build upon at all. Prose had indeed been written before his time, and by others contemporary with him, 'logographers', as they were called—chroniclers, that is, of collections of facts in history and geography, the best known of whom were Hecataeus of Miletus, whom Herodotus often quotes, and Hellanicus; but the work of these men, only fragments of which survive, had no literary pretension. They were pioneers, seeking a form which would express what could not be satisfactorily expressed in poetry, and what they did was valuable; but it was left for Herodotus to take the strange, new medium of language freed from the lilt and melody of verse—verse, which is so easily memorised, so well adapted to recitation which, in those days when solitary reading was seldom, if ever, indulged in, was the only form of 'publication'—and to mould it into an instrument of the subtlest and most delicate art. Herodotus' prose has the flexibility, ease and grace of a man superbly talking, and it is the easiest Greek, with the possible exception of Homer's, for anyone with modest pretensions to scholarship to understand. That it should have the grace of heightened and superb speech is, moreover, no accident, for Herodotus, like the poets, wrote his book to be read aloud, not to be perused in the privacy of a man's study.