The tale of this despatch of treasure to Delphi is a strange one. It may not be true. In any case the motive for it in Herodotus is manifestly impossible. But the tale is not one which can be ignored. The Greek of the fifth century was just as capable of suppressing as of making history. His patriotism had a tendency to run on party lines. The very intensity of the sympathy which he felt for all that was Hellenic made him intensely hostile to any political system in the Hellenic world, or to any representative of a system, which was opposed to his own ideas; _optimi corruptio pessima_. The tyranny of the great king over his subjects, even if they were Greeks, aroused but a lukewarm resentment in the breast of the Greek democrat. He hated with a much fiercer passion the tyranny of Greek over Greek. The barbarian knew no better, because he was a barbarian; the Greek ought to know, because he was a Greek. Nowhere and at no time in Greek history can this feeling have been stronger than in the Athens of the middle of the fifth century, under whose influence Herodotus so manifestly wrote. The Great War had in his day become a story; he just saved it from becoming a myth. The creative genius of the Greek did not discriminate in subject-matter. History, both Ancient and Modern, went alike info the melting-pot of his imagination, to be cast into a fable, often beautiful, with a moral in its train. To such an influence as this Herodotus was peculiarly susceptible. His genuinely conscientious desire to write history in all truth was tinged with a piety which induced an unconscious reservation of fact. He preferred the improbable combined with a distinct moral lesson to the probable when no moral lesson was conveyed. He wished to teach as well as to inform.