HISTORICAL WRITING AMONG THE GREEKS.
I. The Intellectual Setting of the Origins of Greek Historiography.— The birth of his torical writing in Greece required several essen tial conditions which did not exist before the 6th century B.C., namely, the writing of prose, the critical rejection of the current mythology concerning Greek origins and the stimulation of interest in social origins and institutions. By die middle of the 6th century these indispensable prerequisites of history had come into being in the city of Miletus in Ionia. Cadmus of Miletus, at the beginning of the 6th century, had intro duced the practice of writing prose instead of poetry and ranks as one of the earliest of Greek prose writers or logoraPhoi. At the same period there was coming into existence that speculative Ionian philosophy to which the world owes the origin of free thought and critical phi losophy. As Professor Bury has said, 'Our deepest gratitude is due to the Greeks as the originators of liberty of thought and discussion. Ionia in Asia Minor was the cradle of free speculation. The history of European science and European philosophy begins in Ionia. Here in the 6th and 5th centuries ri.c. the earliest philosophers by using their reason sought to penetrate into the origin and structure of the world. They began the work of destroying orthodox views and religious faiths.* Finally, the Persian absorption of Ionia tended to break down the provincialism of the Ionian Greeks, through that all-important factor of the contact of cultures, and to arouse their interest in the civilization of the diverse peoples who dwelt in the great empire of which they had recently become a part. The origin of Greek historical literature, then, was a part of that great in tellectual movement conventionally known as the rise of the logographoi and of the critical Greek philosophy in Ionia. To these more general or cultural explanations of the appearance of the first Greek historical literature, there should be added the personal impulse from the dominating desire of the more prominent citizens of the time to link up their families with a distin guished genealogy. Hesiod had favored the
Greek gods by providing them with a respectable ancestry, and a similar service was rendered to the nobles by the logographoi 2. The Origins of Greek Historiography.— In view of the foregoing sketch of the intel lectual environment of early Greek critical prose, it seems but in the natural course of events that the first Greek historian should have been Hecatzus (born 550 Lc.), a native of Miletus, the birthplace of both Greek prose and Greek critical philosophy. His main signifi cance lies in the fact that he foreshadowed two significant developments of scientific historical method by setting up truth as the ideal of his statements and by assuming a frankly critical attitude toward the conventional Greek creation myths. The opening paragraph of his (Genealo gies) is the first approximation on the part of any writer to a consciousness of the function of historical criticism, "What I write here," he said °is the account which I considered to be true; for the stories of the Greeks are numerous, and in my opinion ridiculous.° The influences which had produced Hecatzus grew more powerful and the necessary develop ments between his
and the