flavor: it was either intended to offer esthetic satisfaction as an
art, or to offer an analysis of past mistakes with the intention of
preventing their recurrence as far as possible.

The early Hellenes did not think of history as separate from
poetry, myth, and drama. Homer's epics, which combine all
these elements, remained for some centuries the normal standard
for other writers to elaborate, and even to add to. For example,
Hesiod, a Boeotian, shows both epic and historical characteristics.
The sequence of metallic ages in his Works and Days, declining
from gold to iron, is a very ancient legend, perhaps with an
archaeological basis, and is found in other cultures; but Hesiod
inserts a fifth age of heroes. It has no particular connection with
the other four; this age of heroes is his attempt to combine legend
with the actual events of the Trojan War.

The change from epic and partly-epic poetry to prose narrative
took place in Ionia, among the seventh-centurylogographoi.
While almost nothing remains of their work, Herodotus, an
Ionian who moved to Athens, benefited greatly by it and even
incorporated sections into his History of the Persian Wars. He-
rodotus is less the Father of History than a developer of the lo-
gographers' methods. He continued the separation of history
from poetry and myth, not using an ordinary narrative (this
would not have been history) but a dramatized and artistic one,
dealing with a particular set of relationships in the immediate
past between Greek and non-Greek (barbarian) peoples. His own
statement of purpose shows the connection with epic poetry and
drama: he writes "with the two-fold object of saving the past
of mankind from oblivion and ensuring that the extraordinary
achievements of the Hellenic and Oriental worlds shall enjoy
their just renown." To do this properly involved a great deal of
research, which Herodotus carried out himself. Thus his defini-
tion of "history" would include geography, natural history and
comparative religion. But the book has the elements of a tragedy,
whose characters are dogged by Nemesis and succumb to a fate
they cannot avoid. Herodotus must have known Aeschylus' The
Persians, which presents the classic triad of koros-hybris-até: sa-
tiety, insolence, blindness. This triad appears more than once in

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