Imagine yourself in the city of Athens near the close of the year 446 B.C. The proud city, after many years of supremacy over the whole of Central Greece, has passed her zenith, and is surely on the decline. She has never recovered from the blow received at Coronea. The year has been one of gloom and foreboding. The coming spring will bring the end of the five years' truce; and an invasion from the Peloponnesus is imminent. But, as the centre of learning, refinement, and the arts, the lustre of her fame is yet undimmed, and men of education throughout the world deem their lives incomplete until they have sought and reached this intellectual Mecca. During this year a stranger from Halicarnassus, in Asia Minor, after many years of travel in Asia, Scythia, Libya, Egypt, and Magna GrÆcia, has taken up his abode at Athens. He is still a young man, hardly thirty-seven, yet his fame is that of the first and greatest of historians. Dramatists and poets immortal there have been, but never man has written such exquisite prose. Twenty centuries and more shall wear away, and his history will be read in a hundred different tongues, as well as in the beautiful and simple Greek that he wrote. His name will grow into a household word; the school-boy will revel in his delightful tales, and wise men will call him the Father of History! For weeks the people of Athens have listened entranced to the public reading of his great work, and now the Assembly has passed a decree tendering to him the city's thanks, together with a most substantial gift in recognition of his talents—a purse of money equal to twelve thousand American dollars. Such is the account which Eusebius gives, and others to whom we may fairly accord belief; and it adds no slight tinge of romance to the picture to discover among the listening throng the figure of the boy Thucydides, moved to tears by the recital, who then and there received the impulse that made of him also a great student and writer of history. Herodotus, noticing how intensely his reading had affected the youth, turned to Olorus, the father of Thucydides, who was standing near, and said: "Olorus, thy son's soul yearns after knowledge."

Herodotus was born at Halicarnassus, 484 B.C., and died at Thurium in Italy, about the year 425. As in the case of Plutarch, our knowledge of his personal history is very meagre, aside from the little we glean from his own writings. His parents, Lyxes and Rhoeo, appear to have been of high rank and consideration in Halicarnassus, and possessed of ample means; and his acquaintance both at home and in Athens was of the best. A lover of poetry and a poet by nature, the whole plan of his work, the tone and character of his thoughts, and a multitude of words and expressions, show him to have been perfectly familiar with the Homeric writings. There is scarcely an author previous to his time with whose works he does not appear to have been thoroughly acquainted. HecatÆus, to be sure, was almost the only writer of prose who had attained any distinction, for prose composition was practically in its infancy; but from him and from several others, too obscure even to be named, he freely quotes, while the poets, Hesiod, Olen, MusÆus, Archilochus, the authors of the "Cypria" and the "Epigoni," AlcÆus, Sappho, Solon, Æsop, Aristeas, Simonides of Ceos, Phrynichus, Æschylus, and Pindar, are referred to, or quoted, in such a way as to show an intimate acquaintance with their works.

The design of Herodotus was to record the struggles between the Greeks and barbarians, but, in carrying it out, as Wheeler, the English analyst of the writings of Herodotus, has happily expressed it, he is perpetually led to trace the causes of the great events of his history; to recount the origin of that mighty contest between liberty and despotism which marked the whole period; to describe the wondrous manners and mysterious religions of nations, and the marvellous geography and fabulous productions of the various countries, as each appeared on the great arena; to tell to an inquisitive and credulous people of cities vast as provinces and splendid as empires; of stupendous walls, temples and pyramids; of dreams, omens, and warnings from the dead; of obscure traditions and their exact accomplishment;—and thus to prepare their minds for the most wonderful story in the annals of men, when all Asia united in one endless array to crush the states of Greece; when armies bridged the seas and navies sailed through mountains; when proud, stubborn-hearted men arose amid anxiety, terror, confusion, and despair, and staked their lives and homes against the overwhelming power of a foreign despot, till Heaven itself sympathized with their struggles, and the winds and waves delivered their country, and opened the way to victory and revenge.

The personal character of Herodotus, reflected from every page that he wrote, renders his vivid story all the more happily suited to the reading and study of boys and girls. He is as honest as the sun; equally impartial to friends and foes; candid in the statement of both sides of a question; and an artist withal in the gift of delineating a character or a people with a few rapid strokes, so bold and masterly that the sketch is placed before you with stereoscopic distinctness. For so early a writer he presents a surprising unity of plan, combined with a variety of detail that is amazing. What if he does crowd and enrich his story with a world of anecdote? What if he feels bound always to paint for you the customs, manners, dress, and peculiarities of a people before he begins their history? This very biographical style is the charm of his pen. Like the flowers of the magnolia-tree, his bright stories and vivid descriptions at times almost overwhelm the root and branch of his narrative; yet, after all, we remember the magnolia more because of its cloud of snowy bloom in the few fleeting days of May than for all its green and shade in the other months. Herodotus, to be sure, lacks that far-seeing faculty of discerning accurately the real causes of great movements, wars, and migrations of men—a faculty possessed pre-eminently by Thucydides and largely by Xenophon, but he is equally far removed from the coldness of the one and the ostentatious display of the other. He is above all things natural, simple, and direct. "He writes," says Aristotle, "sentences which have a continuous flow, and which end only when the sense is complete."

I have allowed Herodotus, as I did Plutarch, to tell you his story in his own words, as closely as the English idiom can reproduce the spirit and flow of the Greek, calling gratefully to my aid the labors of such students, analysts, and translators of Herodotus as Rawlinson, Dahlmann, Cary, and Wheeler; and I have discarded from the text only what is indelicate to the modern ear, or what the young reader might find tedious, redundant, or irrelevant to the main story. But so small a part comes under this head, that I am sure I can fairly say to you: "This is Herodotus himself." If you read him through and do not like him, who will be the disappointed one? Not you, but I!

New York, June 15, 1884.