rs at 6,000.
They are now [in 1863] reckoned at 75,000.

* * * * *

HERODOTUS

History

The "Father of History," as Herodotus has been styled, was
born at Halicarnassus, the centre of a Greek colony in Asia
Minor, between the years 490 and 480 B.C., and lived probably
to sixty, dying about the year 425 B.C. A great part of his
life was occupied with travels and investigations in those
lands with which his history is mainly concerned. His work is
the earliest essay in history in a European language. It is a
record primarily of the causes and the course of the first
great contest between East and West; and is a storehouse of
curious and delightful traveller's gossip as well as a
faithful record of events. The canons of evidence in his day
were defective, for obvious reasons; a miscellaneous divine
interposition in human affairs was taken for granted, and
science had not yet reduced incredible marvels to ordinary
natural phenomena. Nevertheless, Herodotus was a shrewd and
careful critic, honest, and by no means remarkably credulous.
If he had not acquired the conception of history as an exact
science, he made it a particularly attractive form of
literature, to which his simplicity of style gives a slight
but pleasant archaic flavour. This epitome has been specially
prepared far THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS from the Greek text.

_I.--The Rise of Persian Power_

I will not dispute whether those ancient tales be true, of Io and Helen,
and the like, which one or another have called the sources of the war
between the Hellenes and the barbarians of Asia; but I will begin with
those wrongs whereof I myself have knowledge. In the days of Sadyattes,
king of Lydia, and his son Alyattes, there was war between Lydia and
Miletus. And Croesus, the son of Alyattes, made himself master of the
lands which are bounded by the river Halys, and he waxed in power and
wealth, so that there was none like to him. To him came Solon, the
Athenian, but would not hail him as the happiest of all men, saying that
none may be called happy until his life's end.

Thereafter trouble fell upon Croesus by the slaying of his son when he
was a-hunting. Then Cyrus the Persian rose up and made himself master of
the Medes and Persians, and Croesus, fearing his power, was fain to go
up against him, being decei