Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/176

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

Yet it is this power of truthfulness in the man, combined with his tragic grasp and his wide sympathy-this way of seeing men's hearts just as they are with all their greatness and their failure, that causes a critic who weighs his every word, to claim that "no other Greek writer has covered so large a world with so full a population of living and immortal men and women as Herodotus," (Macan, lxxiii.) and to place his work opposite Homer's, "irremovably and irreplaceably" at the fountain-head of European prose literature.