Greek philosophy and science had begun in Ionia and then passed to Athens. To the thinkers of the fourth century B.C. the fall of Athens must have seemed a great disaster, but in reality it was of the utmost service to the world. The Greek spirit was one of those imperishable things that cannot die, and it was to go out from Athens and spread over a wider world than it had hitherto known. It spread first to Alexandria where, in the Hellenistic Age, the next great group of philosophers and men of science were to be found. IV. GREEK LITERATURE: THE HISTORIANS The word _history_ is a Greek word and means an _enquiry_. The Greeks were not the first people in {385} the world who wrote history, but they wrote it as it had never been written before, and some of the greatest history in the world is that which was written by Greeks. These writers were not content with merely narrating events that had taken place, they made what the word history means, an enquiry. They possessed the imagination, not only to describe events and scenes vividly, but to feel as the people about whom they were writing felt, and to understand the passions that moved them at great crises of their history. They were the first historians who took the trouble to find out why nations and individuals acted as they did, and to sift their evidence, finding out what was true and what was false. The oldest of the Greek historians was Herodotus, the _Father of History_, an Ionian born in Halicarnassus in 484 B.C. He spent a good part of his life travelling, during which time he collected materials which he afterwards used in his history. He was a man who was intensely interested in everything he saw, a very credulous traveller, for he seems to have believed almost everything that was told him: old traditions, all kinds of miraculous occurrences, and many things that it is evident could never have happened. Though he undoubtedly believed a great deal that was not true, he did not swallow all that was told him, for after narrating some marvel he will say: "I am bound to report all that is said, but I am not bound to believe it." Herodotus was a deeply religious man, and he lived before the disturbing days when men began to {386} question the existence of the gods. To him history was a great drama, the plot of which was the triumph of the Greek over the Barbarian, which he saw as the will of the gods, and to him, as to all devout Greeks of his day, all wrong-doing, all disobedience to the will of the gods brought its own punishment, its retribution, what the Greeks called its Nemesis.