As a story-teller, Herodotus is unrivalled. He wrote his history in order that "the great and wonderful deeds done by the Greeks and Persians should not lack renown," and the earlier books which give an account of all he had learnt in his travels in the East, of Egypt and Babylonia, of Lydia and Persia, lead up to the great climax, the invasion of Greece by the Persians.[23] In the pages of Herodotus we live again, as we live nowhere else, through all the excitement and thrill of the days when Greece fought the Barbarian and drove him out of the land. The greatest of the Greek historians was Thucydides, great not only among the Greek writers, but among the historians of the world. He was born about 471 B.C., and he wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides was an Athenian, a man of wealth and good position, and was one of the few who had the plague and recovered from it. As the war went on, he was anxious to fight and help to bring it to a victorious close, but a far greater career was in store for him. He was elected a general and sent at the head of an army to relieve {387} Amphipolis and prevent its surrender to the Spartans. But he arrived too late, the city had been taken, and he was exiled in consequence.[24] To this exile we owe his history. Thucydides is one of the most accurate and impartial of historians. He was filled with an abiding love for Athens, but, unlike some Athenians, he felt no bitterness towards her for exiling him. The only remark he makes about his banishment is that it gave him the opportunity to write his history. He was scrupulously fair to both sides, and he tells us himself of the care he took to be accurate and to accept nothing on the evidence of mere tradition. Men do not discriminate, [he said], and are too ready to receive ancient traditions about their own as well as about other countries; and so little trouble do they take in the search after truth; so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand. Of the events of the war I have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to any notion of my own; I have described nothing but what I either saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry. The task was a laborious one, because eye-witnesses of the same occurrences gave different accounts of them, as they remembered or were interested in the actions of one side or the other. If he who desires to have before his eyes a true picture of the events which have happened, and of the like events which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things, shall pronounce what I have written {388} to be useful, then I shall be satisfied. My history is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition which is heard and forgotten.[25]