202 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE firm the memory of his real city and his leader— the man whom they called a demagogue because he was too great for them to understand ; who never took a gift from any man ; who dwelt in austere supremacy ; who, if he had only lived, or his counsels been followed, would have saved and realised the great Athens that was now gone from the earth. Other men of the day wrote pamphlets and arguments. Thucydides has not the heart to argue. He has studied the earlier and the mythical times, and prepared that marvellous introduc- tion. He has massed all the history of his own days as no man ever had massed history before. He knows ten times more than any of these writers, and he means to know more still before he gives out his book. Above all, he is going to let the truth speak for itself. No man shall be able to contradict him, no man show that he is ever unfair. And he will clothe all his story in words like the old words of Gorgias, Prodicus, Antiphon, and Pericles himself. He will wake the great voices of the past to speak to this degenerate world. His death came first. The book was unfinished. Even as it stood it was obsolete before it was pub- lished. As a chronicle it was continued by Xenophon, and as a manifesto on human vanity by Theopompus ; but the style and the spirit of it passed over the heads of the fourth century. Some two hundred years later, indeed, he began to be recognised among the learned as the great truthful historian. But within fifty years of his death Ephorus had rewritten, expanded, popu- larised, and superseded him, and left him to wait for the time of the archaistic revival of the old Greek litera- ture in the days of Augustus Caesar.
