Still sadder is that this great man, having undertaken to narrate a very small, though a very long, war, so magnifies its importance as to make it out the greatest crisis that ever happened, and therefore excludes from his history almost everything which would be of real interest to the permanent study of Greek life. He passes briefly over the deeply interesting but now quite obscure period of the rise of the Athenian power. A detailed history of the fifty years preceding his war would indeed have been an inestimable boon to posterity. He passes in contemptuous silence over all the artistic development of Athens. The origin of the drama, Æschylus, Susarion, Cratinus; the growth of sculpture, Pheidias, Ictinus, the building of the Parthenon, of the temple of Theseus,--all this is a blank in his narrative. And yet he does not think it inconsistent with his plan to give us a sketch of the famous _fifty years_ that elapsed between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. He proposes to correct the inaccuracies of Hellanicus, his only predecessor in this field, and there can be no doubt that what he has condescended to give us is both accurate and valuable. But so scanty are his details, so frequent his silence on really important public events, that we are fain to turn to any inferior author to fill the gap. [Sidenote: supplied by inferior historians.] [Sidenote: Diodorus.] [Sidenote: Date of the destruction of Mycenæ.] Of these there are (apart from the poets) two extant, Diodorus and Plutarch. Both these men lived long after the events, and were beholden to literary sources for their information. The whole tone and the arrangement of Diodorus' eleventh book show that he used Ephorus as his chief authority. The citations from Ephorus by other authors make this conclusion unavoidable. The value of Diodorus' account, when it adds to what Thucydides has said, is therefore to be estimated by the value of Ephorus as an independent historian. On this I have already declared my opinion (§ 30), to which I need only add that I fully agree with Busolt when he says that for the early years of the period Ephorus had no other authority than Thucydides of any value. The only new fact that Diodorus preserves for us is the alleged destruction of Mycenæ by the Argives (_circ._ 464 B.C.), at a moment, he infers, when Sparta was in the crisis of the Helot insurrection, and unable to interfere. [Sidenote: Silence of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.]