the epic poets might have led them to do—it may be conjectured that these were of the simplest kind. There is one, indeed, who has left proof that he could write dialogue with the ease and grace of Herodotus himself[1]. But Ion of Chios was a poet as well as a chronicler; he knew the Athens of Pericles; and his memoirs, with their sprightly gossip, must have been very unlike the normal type of Ionian chronicle.
Herodotus is distinguished from his predecessors, first of all, by an epic unity of plan. It is hard to say exactly how far he was superior to them in his method of verifying facts; his diligence and his honesty are both unquestionable, and we know that he attempted—not very scientifically, perhaps—to decide between conflicting versions of the same story. But in the dramatic element of his narrative he shows the true freedom of an epic poet. In his History, as in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the author seldom speaks when there is a fair pretext for making the characters speak. The habitual use of "direct speech," or easy dialogue, is evidently a different thing from the insertion of set speeches: there is nothing necessarily rhetorical about it. It is merely the vivid way of describing thought and motive, the way natural to a simple age; and in the
- ↑ The story of the poet Sophocles defending the phrase ἐπὶ πορφυρέαις παρῇσιν against the criticisms of a learned guest at a supper-party in Chios. (Müller, Fragm. Hist. vol. ii. p. 46.) The Ἐπιδημίαι, in which it occurred, seem to have been Ion's account of his own "visits" to Athens and other cities. (Ibid. p. 45.)
