THE GREAT PERSIAN WAR.*
Ma.. Cox has wasted some scholarship, very considerable power of writing, and a great deal of acumen upon a very profitless task. He has detached all that Herodotus has told us of the contest between the Greeks and the Persians from the remainder of his narrative, translated it, as he says,in an " unfettered" style, and subjected the whole to analysis based upon a theory which we can only describe as the Old Bailey view of criticism. He has a real love for his author, a trae sympathy with his matchless simplicity and pleasantness, and he brings to his task a shrewdness which might be mistaken for true critical power, but his plan is not the less radically unsound. The first half of his book is simply so much paper and ink thrown away. Nobody wants a mosaic of Herodotean bits. Few will read Mr. Cox except men whose scholarship is sufficient to enable them to follow Herodotus without being confused by his digressions, and those few demand before all things that a translation shall present with the most literal accuracy all the historian said in the way in which he said it, which is not by any means the way adopted by Mr. Cox. He thinks, of course, he has made his author clear, and forgets that in so doing he has deprived him of all that indicates his special mental position and grade in literature ; all the digressions, and interpolated nar- ratives, and inconsequent paragraphs, which prove that Herodotus was essentially. a raconteur, and not a philosophic historian. The Persian War is not Trite so deceptive as Mr. Wheeler's " Hero- dotus," which was simply a novel with no recommendation but ingenuity, but it is just as useless. Nobody could rely on it unless intimately acquainted with the original, and anybody so acquainted will, we fear, dispense with Mr. Cox. The value of his work, therefore, depends entirely on its criticisms, which, as we have said, are shrewd, but not of the kind which help to elucidate history. There is no principle at the bottom of them. Mr. Cox cross-examines Herodotus like an Old Bailey barrister, not to prove an account which he himself believes to be true, but simply to destroy the general credibility of his witness. He writes freely of the " epical unity" and completeness of the narrative, and believes that Herodotus, in his earnest credulity as to Divine interfer- ence, and sceptical acuteness in remarking on physical facts, was an embodiment of his age, but 'he wants all the while to prove him a simpleton, of no use at all to history. The business of the philoso- phical historian is, we take it, to construct as well as to analyse, to point out which of the gems scattered in the great collection are antique, and not only to hint trivial objections to them all. Mr. Cox, for ex- ample, in principle if not in practice, rejects tradition altogether, arguing that " It is not merely that personal feelings may influence the form of tra- dition, but we may define the length of time during which the memory of various classes of events may be faithfully preserved." This "time" being apparently two or three generations. The evidence of registers and monuments is equally untrustworthy : " To refer to public documents, to state registers, or other inscriptions, is to adduce evidence which is rather specious than real ; and Mr. RawliIIson would seem to state more than what even a lenient historical standard would justify, when he asserts that `from these and similar sources of ill- formation Herodotus would be able to check the accounts orally delivered to • The Great Persian War. By the Rev. G W. Cox. Longmaxis. him, and in some cases to fill them up with accuracy ' That
Herodotus rests his alleged facts on such testimony is indisputable ; the question turns simply on the value of the testimony, and we are tempted to forget that public monuments and inscriptions must be judged by precisely the same tests as those which are applied to historical narratives. As evidence of facts long anterior to their own date, they can have no weight; as proofs even of contemporary events, they required to be examined and checked not less strictly than the statements of individual historians. Mr. Grote rightly insisted on the necessity of ascertaining whether the inscriber had an adequate knowledge of the facts which he records, and whether or not there may be reason to suspect misrepresentation."
Add to these two principles the third, that the epical and mytholo- gical machinery employed by Herodotus is "inextricably inter- woven" with his narrative, and that both must be accepted or neither, and nothing remains except, indeed, Mr. Cox's internal conscious- ness, and perhaps a building or two. The early history of Rome is already reduced to the Cloaca Maxima, and of that we know nothing except that the balance of probabilities is in favour of somebody, it is not known who, having built it, it is not known when, for some end which is entirely doilatful. The history of the Persian war dis- appears under this treatment, or resolves itself into a possibility that a Persian king did once attack Greece, which is not very soothing to liberal curiosity. We are not concerned to deny the validity of this mode of criticism on account of its results, though they deprive history of its value, and ancient life of the graceful thoughts and mighty deeds which have become part of our mental fibre. The fact that Greeks could be thrilled with admiration at the story of Thermopylae is to us as full of instruction as the glorious story itself, but we contend this method of criticism is radically unsound.
Let us take, for instance, this story of Thermopylae, which for three thousand years has nerved the will and exalted the thoughts of all patriotic men, and which Mr. Cox declares to be a " beautiful legend." With respect to the entire story he says : "There is a natural reluct- ance to touch with the rude hand of criticism this beautiful legend, which vindicates for the Spartans something like an equal glory with that of the Athenians in their resistance to the barbarian; but when once the narrative is convicted of inconsistency or contradiction, the extent of the contradiction becomes a matter of little practical mo- ment." We need not argue the absurdity of the principle here laid down, for it can be proved by an illustration. Nothing could be more transparently inconsistent than all American accounts of the battle of Bull's Run, and, according to Mr. Cox, it being once proved that the statements are contradictory, the battle never occurred. The truth is, tradition at first had as definite an origin as any other mode of trans- mitting intelligence. The first stages of the story of ThermopvIte, for instance, were reported all over Greece by the troops whom Leonidas, after his position became untenable, is said to have sent away. The latter scenes were related by the Thebaus who were not killed, by Aristodemus, who must have given a kind of official account to Sparta, and by at least one Helot. When the tale began to circulate, thousands were able to test it by direct oral evidence from eye-. witnesses, and its instant acceptance by all classes is in itself proof that it was in accord with all the facts previously known to the au- dience. For, be it remembered, the story did not flatter the national vanity of all Greece, but only of Sparta, which state again was not the one which governed Greek opinion or produced the Greek ra- conteurs. The presumption in favour of the story becomes, there- fore, all but irresistible, and it only remains to examine its intrinsic probability. There is nothing prima' facie to make it improbable. If it were told to-morrow of 300 Englishmen attacked by the popu- lation of the Punjab, it would create no surprise, even if the nar- rator added that the English before meeting the foe were running races and dressing themselves. Mr. Cox is extremely indefinite, but he implies rather than asserts that for Leonidas to send one-half of his force away was an inexplicable bit of bad generalship, that he is said to have retained the Thebans, though they were notorious " Medizers," that the 4000 who remained could not have killed 20,000 Persians, and that all the personal anecdotes, including the celebrated saying of Demaratus, were untrustworthy. Finally, he thinks it unintelli- gible that Leonidas might have retreated but did not, the more so as the supposed motive, the assurance of the Delphian oracle that Sparta, or one of her kings, must perish, did not exist, the saying being uttered too late. All these arguments seem to us singularly inconclusive, when weighed against so simple a narrative. The story is not affected by Leonidas's want of generalship, even if he tits played au, but there is no evidence to justify such an accusation. The Spartan ki g simply gave the order to retire because his allies would have gone without it ; but twenty military motives—dis- trust, or want of food, or deficiency of water, or even a reso- lution to die—might be suggested as adequate explanations. To discredit the story on such grounds would compel us to disbelieve in Waterloo because Wellington ordered the Belgians off the ground. As to the retention of the Thebans, they were either "Medized" or not. If they were, as their coldness seems to indi- cate, it would have been the height of impolicy to send them tojoin the Persians, while, if they were not and they were all selected from anti-Median families—they might have been a valuable addition to the force. But why did not Leonidas retreat ? Why did not the Euro- peans in India retreat ? Because, in the first place, it was their duty to stay ; and because, in the second, the pride of race is one of the strongest passions of which man is capable, and retreat before bar- barians seemed to a Spartan king inexpiable shame. Whether Leonidas was encouraged by an oracle, or supported by a military rule, does not signify a jot. His action was perfectly natural, just as natural as that of the sergeant who, the other day, deliberately chose death rather than "kotow" to a Chinaman. Then as to the slaughter. The struggle lasted five days, and supposing the Spartans to have been the number given be Mr. Cox—viz. 4000—they still on each day killed only their own number. They were European athletes, fully armed, and accustomed to act in rank, and they were attacked—except in the single charge of the Immortals—by an Asiatic mob, as distrustful then as they are now, without heart for the contest, and with no officers iu front. They died in heaps, just as the Mexicans did under the Cortez charge, or as the sepoys did in India whenever the British troops could come within musket's length. Two British regiments attacked by a Chinese army without fire-arms would probably do as much execution, and would fall as the Spartans did, only when utterly worn out, perform. ing like Leonidas this service for the world, that every man's heart to all time would grow stronger as he recalled the act.
We do not wish to deny that in some of these legends the admix- ture of fable is much greater than in the story of Thermopylas, and that Mr. Cox, on one or two points, shows a creditable acumen. But history is not altered by doubts as to the motives of its actors, and our disbelief in the Greek mythological machinery no more affects the historic value of their legends, than our disbelief in ecclesiastical miracles affects the history of the Papacy. Leonidas died, though no oracle spoke, just as St. Francis lived, though he did not hang his hat on a sunbeam.
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