390 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE him still more against the military despots. His two great works were Hellenica, in twelve, and Philippica, in fifty-eight books. Like other verbose men, he liked to preach silence and simplicity. He was possibly a pro- fessed member of the Cynic sect ; at any rate, he was a hater of the world, and a despiser of the great. He believed that all the evils of Greece were due to her ' three heads,' Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, and that kings and statesmen and ' leaders of the people ' were gener- ally the scum of society. He is praised for his skill in seeing secret causes and motives — chiefly bad ones — behind the veils of diplomacy, and his style is almost universally admired. The so-called Longinus, On the Sublime, quotes his description of the entry of the Great King into Egypt, beginning with magnificent tents and chariots, ending with bundles of shoe-leather and pickled meats. The critic complains of bathos ; but the passage reads like the intentional bathos of satire. His military descriptions fail to please Polybius, and it is hard to excuse the long speeches he puts into the mouth of generals in action. The Sicilian TiM^US was a historian of the same tendency, a pure student, ignorant of real warfare, who wrote the history of his own island in thirty-eight books. He, too, took a severe view, not only of kings and diplomats, but also of other historians ; ^ but he pos- sessed the peculiar merit of having thoroughly mastered his sources, including inscriptions and monuments, and even Carthaginian and Phoenician archives. Polybius also praises the accuracy of his chronology. Turning aside from special histories like the Atthis of Philochorus and the Samian Chronicle of Duris, we ' Hence his nickname 'E7ri7-tV"'«)s, Diod. Sic. 5. i, and Ath. 272.
