The first Greek to whom it occurred that a narrative of facts might be made intensely interesting was Herodotus (484-432 B.C.), a native of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, the Homer of Greek history. Obliged, for political reasons, to leave his native land, he visited many countries, such as Egypt, Babylon, and Persia, and spent the latter years of his life in one of the Grecian settlements in Italy, where he devoted himself to the composition of his work. His travels were undertaken from the pure spirit of inquiry, and for that age they were very extensive and important. It is probable that his great and intricate plan, hitherto unknown in the historical writings of the Greeks, did not at first occur to him, and that it was only in his later years that he conceived the complete idea of a work so far beyond those of his predecessors and contemporaries. It is stated that he recited his history at different festivals, which is quite credible, though there is little authority for the story that at one of these Thucydides was present as a boy, and shed tears, drawn forth by his own desire for knowledge and his intense interest in the narrative. His work comprehends a history of nearly all the nations of the world at that time known. It has an epic character, not only from the equable and uninterrupted flow of the narrative, but also from certain pervading ideas which give a tone to the whole. The principal of these is the idea of a fixed destiny, of a wise arrangement of the world, which has prescribed to every being his path, and which allots ruin and destruction not only to crime and violence, but to excessive power and riches and the overweening pride which is their companion. In this consists the envy of the gods so often mentioned by Herodotus, and usually called by the other Greeks the divine Nemesis. He constantly adverts in his narrative to the influence of this divine power, the Daemonion, as he calls it. He shows how the Deity visits the sins of the ancestors upon their descendants, how man rushes, as it were, wilfully upon his own destruction, and how oracles mislead by their ambiguity, when interpreted by blind passion. He shows his awe of the divine Nemesis by his moderation and the firmness with which he keeps down the ebullitions of national pride. He points out traits of greatness of character in the hostile kings of Persia, and shows his countrymen how often they owed their successes to Providence and external advantages rather than to their own valor and ability. Since Herodotus saw the working of a divine agency in all human events, and considered the exhibition of it as the main object of his history, his aim is totally different from that of a historian who regards the events of life merely with reference to men. He is, in truth, a theologian and a poet as well as a historian. It is, however, vain to deny that when Herodotus did not see himself the events which he describes, he