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There can be no doubt that this was the first great period of his literary activity, though he may have edited, in early youth, his predecessor Thucydides, and composed the first two books of his historical continuation entitled "Hellenica."
By the time this prodigy of intellect and industry reached the age of fourteen he had studied the following formidable list: Virgil, Horace, Phaedrus, Livy, Sallust, the Metamorphoses, Terence, Cicero, Homer, Thucydides, the Hellenica, Demosthenes, Æschines, Lysias, Theocritus, Anacreon, Aristotle's Rhetoric; Euclid, Algebra, the higher mathematics, Joyce's Scientific Dialogues, and various treatises on Chemistry; and in addition to all this he had read parts of other Greek and Latin authors, and much of English poetry and history.
Intimate, apparently, with the great historian Thucydides, whose unfinished work he seems to have edited, and subsequently to have continued in his own "Hellenica," he must have long foreseen the collapse of the Athenian empire, and then he and many other adventurous spirits found themselves in a society faded in prosperity, with no scope for energy or enterprise.
Then take up ancient history in the detail, reading the following books in the following order: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophontis Hellenica, Xenophontis Anabasis, Arrian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, Justin. This shall form the first stage of your historical reading, and is all I need mention to you now. The next, will be of Roman history.* From that we will come down to modern history.
Edited by Evelyn Abbott, Hellenica. Bury, History of Greece. Davies and Vaughan, Plato's Republic. Welldon, Aristotle's Politics. Peters, Aristotle's Ethics. Bridges, The Spirit of Man. 'The Unity of Western Civilization, c. The Spirit of Man, 40; Phaedo, 96. The Spirit of Man, 16; Phaedo, 66. Natural Religion, part ii, c. 5. De An. ii. 4, 415, p. 35. The Spirit of Man, 39; Aristotle, Met. 10.
Born in Athens about 430 B.C.; died after 357; celebrated as historian and essayist, being a disciple of Socrates; joined the expedition of Cyrus the Younger in 401, and after the battle of Cunaxa became the chief leader of ten thousand Greeks in their march to the Black Sea, the story being chronicled in his famous "Anabasis"; fought on the Spartan side in the battle of Coronea; banished from Athens, he settled at Scillus in Eleia; spent his last years in Corinth; among his writings besides the "Anabasis" are the "Hellenica," "Cycropædia," "Memorabilia of Socrates," and essays on hunting and horsemanship.
The HELLENICA is a continuation of the history of Thucydides, and comprehends in seven books a space of about 48 years; namely, from the time when Thucydides breaks off, B.C. 411, to the battle of Mantinea in 362.
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