THE FROGS 405 ” Here again Euripides is the butt. The chorus was made up to represent frogs, whose croakings were imitated. THE WOMEN MET IN ASSEMBLY 392 ” Certain strong-minded female communists, advocates of women’s rights, seize on the government and undertake the reformation of public abuses. This play contains the longest word known, made up of 77 syllables and 169 letters. PLUTUS 388 ” HISTORY. During this halcyon age of Greek poetry, prose also was cultivated, and in the century following the Persian Wars it was brought to maturity. After the victories that secured her freedom, Greece felt the need of a national historian to record the story of her struggles and triumphs. The earliest narrators, as has been shown, confined themselves to mythology and tradition: the times now demanded an artist who could paint with faithful pencil on living canvas those scenes that were the glory of Hellas—and in Herodotus of Halicarnassus that artist appeared. =Herodotus= (born 484 B.C.).—Halicarnassus was the capital of a Dorian confederacy of states in southern Asia Minor. Its queen Artemisia supported Xerxes in his quarrel with Greece; and although the Athenians, provoked that a woman should take the field against them, offered an immense reward for her capture, she escaped the perils of war, and carried her kingdom safely through the political troubles of the time. The parents of Herodotus were persons of rank and property. His writings prove him to have been well read in the literature of his country. Though not an Ionian born, he adopted the Ionic dialect—the dress in which Greek prose first appeared. Herodotus spent the best twenty years of his life in travelling over the greater part of the known world, studying the history, geography, and customs of the countries he visited. Thebes and Memphis, Tyre and Jerusalem, Babylon and Ecbat’ana—with all he made personal acquaintance, extending his tour as far west as the Greek settlements in Italy, and as far south as the first cataract of the Nile. The marvellousness of the stories he collected brought down upon Herodotus the ridicule of his fellow-citizens; so quitting Halicarnassus when about thirty-seven years of age, he settled at Athens. Here, it is related, he read his history, still in the rough, to the admiring people, who voted him a handsome reward. Here also he seems to have become intimate with Sophocles and his great contemporaries; and here, perhaps, his ambition was kindled to add another star to the galaxy that made Athens the glory of the world.