object; in Thucydides, it is a rare jewel in a severe setting. And yet how graceful and fanciful and altogether charming Thucydides can be, in spite of his scorn for the historical charmer, is to be seen in the digression which depicts the career of Themistocles after his ostracism (i, 135-138). Threading his way through the maze of legend which had accumulated about the figure of Themistocles after his departure from the better known parts of Hellas, Thucydides has not the heart to eliminate from his story certain most romantic features, and shows us in the scene at the palace of Admetus, King of the Molossians, an ability to follow and develop Homeric suggestions fully equal to that of Herodotus. It is like a smile upon a stern face (λέων ἐγέλασεν ἐνταῦθα[1]).
On the speeches also in Thucydides the whole time now at our disposal might profitably be spent.[2] A purely ornamental literary device in Homer and Herodotus has been lifted by him into a means for securing that personal detachment from the events and characters of his story which is the despair of all who come after him, and an apparent objectivity of presentation which is seen only in the best drama. These speeches range all the way from the brief hortatory appeal of a commander to his soldiers just before a battle, through the lengthy addresses of embassies to parliamentary assemblies, up to the matchless speech put into the mouth of Pericles ostensibly to commemorate the citizens of Athens fallen in battle during an uneventful year of the war, but really to set forth the historian's broad conception of the imperial democracy of Athens, now fallen, and of the high ideals of that democracy's first ruler and guide. "I have put into the mouth of each speaker," says Thucydides (i, 22, 1), "the sentiments proper to the occasion, expressed as
