noted between 800 and 600 B.C. with one exception, the full import of
which will be plain at our next survey. This was the eastward movement
of the Greeks.




CHAPTER IV

THE EAST IN 400 B.C.


As the fifth century draws to its close the East lies revealed at last
in the light of history written by Greeks. Among the peoples whose
literary works are known to us, these were the first who showed
curiosity about the world in which they lived and sufficient
consciousness of the curiosity of others to record the results of
inquiry. Before our present date the Greeks had inquired a good deal
about the East, and not of Orientals alone. Their own public men,
military and civil, their men of science, their men of letters, their
merchants in unknown number, even soldiers of theirs in thousands, had
gone up into Inner Asia and returned. Leading Athenians, Solon, Hippias
and Themistocles, had been received at Eastern courts or had accompanied
Eastern sovereigns to war, and one more famous even than these,
Alcibiades, had lately lived with a Persian satrap. Greek physicians,
Democedes of Croton, Apollonides of Cos, Ctesias of Cnidus, had
ministered to kings and queens of Persia in their palaces. Herodotus of
Halicarnassus had seen Babylon, perhaps, and certainly good part of
Syria; Ctesias had dwelt at Susa and collected notes for a history of
the Persian Empire; Xenophon of Attica had tramped from the