Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

GREECE.]

HIPPOCRATES.

suddenly arose to oppose the decline of the art of healing, and to recal physic to the principles of the most dignified of its legislators.

The best editions of the works of Hippocrates are that of Fæsius, Geneva, fol. 1657; of Linden, 2 vols. 8vo. Amsterdam, 1665; and that of Mackius, 2 vols. fol. Viennæ, 1743. His treatises, especially his aphorisms, have been published separately.

[ocr errors]
[graphic][merged small][ocr errors]

HERODOTUS.

THE first historians were poets; the annals of nations were, for a long time, written in verse; they are more easily impressed upon the memory than in prose; they were sung, and savages and barbarians are excited to glory, by celebrating the exploits of their ancestors.

Herodotus was born about 500 years B. J. C. at a time when the imagination was greatly heated by the grandest spectacles. His father's name was Lyxes, and that of his mother's Dryo.. When his country laboured under the oppressive tyranny of Lygdamis, he fled to Samos, and travelled over Egypt, Italy, and Greece. He afterwards returned to Halicarnassus, and expelled the tyrant; which patriotic deed, far from gaining the esteem and admiration of the populace, displeased and irritated them so that Herodotus, was obliged to fly to Greece, from public resentment.

[ocr errors]

ان

These occurrences, an intercourse with enlightened men of every country, and an initiation into certain mysteries concealed from the multitude, extended his knowledge, and rendered him capable of extraordinary enterprizes. He made the Greeks acquainted with the history of the barbarians in a manner suited to interest their pride. In writing for a people enamoured of whiat was marvellous, he respected the fables believed by the vulgar, and displayed frequently the imagination: of

« AnteriorContinuar »