From Coptic Christianity, just preparing to confront twelve centuries of Mohammedan persecution, we must now turn back to Pagan Greece. The Persian wars have breathed a new life into Greece and its colonies, and given them a feeling of unity such as they never possessed before. Athens has taken its place as leader not only in art and literature, but also in war, and under the shelter of her name the Ionians of Asia Minor have ventured to defy their Persian lord, and the Ionic dialect has ceased to be an object of contempt. The Greek, always restless and curious to see and hear “some new thing,” is now beginning to indulge his tastes at leisure, and to visit as a tourist the foreign shores of the Mediterranean. Art has leaped at a single bound to its perfection in the sculptures of Pheidias; poetry has become divine in the tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles, and history is preparing to take part in the general development. The modern world of Europe is already born. The founder of literary history—of history, that is to say, which aims at literary form and interest—was Herodotos of Halikarnassos. If Greek tradition may be trusted, his uncle had been put to death by Lygdamis, the despot of the city, and the subsequent expulsion of the tyrant was in some measure due to the political zeal of the future historian. Herodotos was wealthy and well educated, as fond of travel as the majority of his countrymen, and not behind them in curiosity and vanity. He had cultivated the literary dialect of Ionia, perhaps during his stay in Samos, and had made good use there of the library of Polykratês, the friend and correspondent of Amasis. What other libraries he may have consulted we do not know, but his history shows that he had a considerable acquaintance with the works of his predecessors, whom he desired to eclipse and supersede. Hekatæus of Miletus, who had travelled in Egypt as far south as Thebes, if not Assuan, and had written a full account of the country, its people and its history, Xanthus, the Lydian, who had compiled the annals of his native land, beside numberless other authors, historians and geographers, poets and dramatists, philosophers and physicists, had been made to contribute to his work. Now and again he refers to the older historians when he wishes to correct or contradict them; more frequently he silently incorporates their statements and words without mentioning them by name. It was thus, we are told by Porphyry, that he “stole” the accounts given by Hekatæus of the crocodile, the hippopotamus and the phœnix, and the incorrectness of his description of that marvellous bird, which, like Hekatæus, he likens to an eagle, proves that the charge is correct. Reviewers did not exist in his days, nor were marks of quotation or even footnotes as yet invented, and Herodotos might therefore plead that, although he quoted freely without acknowledgment, he was not in any real sense a plagiarist. He only acted like other Greek writers of his