It is natural to quote Herodotus. The Father of History seems to have been conscious of his purpose and to have expressed it. We are told that he gave his history to the world "in order that the things men have done might not in time be forgotten, and that the great and wonderful deeds of both Greeks and barbarians might not become unheard of,--this, and why they fought with one another." This statement seems to be, in principle, an adequate expression of the purpose of writing histories, even if Herodotus did not execute that purpose with fidelity. The limitations of its specific terms are obvious. One might expect that the great deeds were mainly exploits at arms, that the history would be military, and that the causes exposed would be causes of war. But the history itself deals with geography and climate, with manners, customs, traditions, and institutions, fully as much as with heroes and battles. Professor Gilbert Murray says of it: "His work is not only an account of a thrilling struggle, politically very important, and spiritually tremendous; it is also, more perhaps than any other known book, the expression of a whole man, the representation of all the world seen through the medium of one mind and in a particular perspective. The world was at that time very interesting; and the one mind, while strongly individual, was one of the most comprehensive known to human records. Herodotus's whole method is highly subjective. He is too sympathetic to be consistently critical, or to remain cold towards the earnest superstitions of people about him: he shares from the outset their tendency to read the activity of a moral God in all the moving events of history. He is sanguine, sensitive, a lover of human nature, interested in details if they are vital to his story, oblivious of them if they are only facts and figures; he catches quickly the atmosphere of the society he moves in, and falls readily under the spell of great human influences, the solid impersonal Egyptian hierarchy or the dazzling circle of great individuals at Athens; yet all the time shrewd, cool, gentle in judgment, deeply and unconsciously convinced of the weakness of human nature, the flaws of its heroism and the excusableness of its apparent villainy. His book bears for good and ill the stamp of this character and this profession."[1]