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Ancrum had kept his promise, and was helping him with his Greek; but his teaching hardly kept pace with the boy's enthusiasm and capacity. The voracity with which he worked at his Thucydides and Homer left the lame minister staring and sighing.
Nor, though Hippias was the eldest, does he seem to have exercised a more prominent authority than the rest since, in the time of Thucydides, and long afterward, it was the popular error to consider Hipparchus the first-born. Hippias was already of mature age; and, as we have seen, it was he who had counselled his father not to despair, after his expulsion from Athens.
Tacitus, 2 vols. Titus Livy, Thucydides, 2 vols. Vertot, 4 vols. Denina, 8 vols. Frederick II, 8 vols. POETRY. Osaian, 1 vol. Tasso, 6 vols. Ariosto, 6 vols. Homer, 6 vols. Virgil, 4 vols. The Henriade, 1 vol. Telemachus, 2 vols. Les Jardin, 1 vol. The Chefs-d'Oeuvre of the French Theatre, 20 vols. Select Light Poetry, 10 vols. La Fontaine. ROMANCE. Voltaire, 4 vols. Heloise, 4 vols.
In fact, it would be possible to write the story of our Peloponnesian war in phrases of Thucydides, and I should not be surprised if such a task were a regular school exercise at Eton or at Rugby. Why, it was but the other day that Professor Tyrrell, of Dublin, translated a passage from Lowell's Biglow Papers into choice Aristophanese.
Later in the year he suddenly turned his forces against the Athenian colony of Amphipolis, which he induced to surrender by offering very favourable terms before Thucydides, who was in command of Thasos, arrived to relieve it. The further successes of Brasidas during this winter made the Athenians ready to treat for peace, and a truce was agreed upon for twelve months.
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."
But very few races have made this step of progress; very few have been capable even of the meanest sort of history; and as for writing such a history as that of Thucydides, most nations could as soon have constructed a planet. When history begins to record, she finds most of the races incapable of history, arrested, unprogressive, and pretty much where they are now.
Without minutely criticizing these details, we ascertain, at least, that Thucydides was the peculiar object of his study and imitation.
We have most of us read of such frightful visitations in Thucydides, in Ovid, in Virgil, in Lucretius, not to mention the moderns; but if any of us were to write down the sum and substance of his knowledge, and attempt to discover from any trustworthy evidence the nature, the course, and the intensity of any great plague that has ever proved a real scourge upon any large section of the human race, what would his summing-up amount to?
Two points more in Thucydides remain for our consideration: his treatment of the rise of Greek civilisation, and of the primitive condition of Hellas, as well as the question how far can he be said really to have recognised the existence of laws regulating the complex phenomena of life.
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