J92 HISTORY OF GREECE. past had no other materials to work upon except the mythes} but these they found already cast by the logographers into a con- tinuous series, and presented as an aggregate of antecedent his- tory, chronologically deduced from the times of the gods. In common with the body of the Greeks, both Herodotus and Thu- cydides had imbibed that complete and unsuspecting belief in the general reality of mythical antiquity, which was interwoven with the religion and the patriotism, and all the public demonstrations of the Hellenic world. To acquaint themselves with the genuine details of this foretime, was an inquiry highly interesting to them : but the increased positive tendencies of their age, as well as their own habits of personal investigation, had created in them an his- torical sense in regard to the past as well as to the present. Hav ing acquired a habit of appreciating the intrinsic tests of histor- ical credibility and probability, they found the particular narra- tives of the poets and logographers, inadmissible as a whole even in the eyes of Hekataeus, still more at variance with their stricter canons of criticism. And we thus observe in them the constant struggle, as well as the resulting compromise, between these two opposite tendencies ; on one hand a firm belief in the reality of the mythical world, on the other hand an inability to accept the details which their only witnesses, the poets and logographers, told them respecting it. Each of them however performed the process in his own way Herodotus is a man of deep and anxious religious feeling ; he often recognizes the special judgments of the gods as determining historical events : his piety is also partly tinged with that mystical vein which the last two centuries had gradually infused into the religion of the Greeks for he is apprehensive of giving offence to the gods by reciting publicly what he has heard respecting them ; he frequently stops short in his narrative and intimates that there is a sacred legend, but that he will not tell it : in othei cases, where he feels compelled to speak out, he entreats forgive- ness for doing so from the gods and heroes. Sometimes he will not even mention the name of a god, though he generally thinks himself authorized to do so, the names being matter of public notoriety. 1 Such pious reserve, which the open-hearted Herodo* 1 Herodot. ii. 3, 51, 61, 65, 170. He alludes briefly (c. 51 ) to an Ipbf /loyo? which was communicated in the Samothracian mysteries, but he does not
