[139] not jioing the fools who dared fight their betters." Then comes the rising of the better part of Greece above its religion, the gathering of "them that were better minded," and thus at last the tremendous narrative of battle.
Much has been written about the composition of the histories of Herodotus. They fall apart very easily, they contain repetitions and contradictions in detail, and the references to events and places outside the course of the story raise problems in the mind of an interested reader. Bauer worked at this question on the hypothesis that the book was made up of separate 'Logoi' inorganically strung together. Kirchoff held that the work was originally conceived as a whole, and composed gradually. Books I.-III.119, which show no reference to the West, were written before 447, and before the author went to Thurii; some time later he worked on to the end of Book IV.; lastly, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War he returned to Athens, and in that stirring time wrote all the second half of his work, Books V.-IX. He had meant to go much further; but the troubles of 431 interrupted the work, and his death left it unfinished. Mr. Macan supposes that the last three books were the first written, and that the rest of the work is a proem, "composed of more or less independent parts, of which II. is the most obvious, while the fourth book contains two other parts, only one degree less obvious"; but that internal evidence can never decide whether any of these parts were composed or published independently.
Some little seems certain: the last events he mentions are the attack on Plataea in 431 B.C., the subsequent invasion of Attica by the Lacedaemonians, and the [140]
