fortune, he is only the relator, not the author of them. If they
are beaten in a sea-fight, it is not he who sinks them; if they fly,
it is not he who pursues them; all he can do is to wish well to, and
offer up his vows for them; but by passing over or contradicting
facts, he cannot alter or amend them. It would have been very easy
indeed for Thucydides, with a stroke of his pen, to have thrown down
the walls of Epipolis, sunk the vessel of Hermocrates, or made an
end of the execrable Gylippus, who stopped up all the avenues with
his walls and ditches; to have thrown the Syracusans on the
Lautumiae, and have let the Athenians go round Sicily and Italy,
according to the early hopes of Alcibiades: but what is past and
done Clotho cannot weave again, nor Atropos recall.

The only business of the historian is to relate things exactly as
they are: this he can never do as long as he is afraid of
Artaxerxes, whose physician {55a} he is; as long as he looks for the
purple robe, the golden chain, or the Nisaean horse, {55b} as the
reward of his labours; but Xenophon, that just writer, will not do
this, nor Thucydides. The good historian, though he may have
private enmity against any man, will esteem the public welfare of
more consequence to him, and will prefer truth to resentment; and,
on the other hand, be he ever so fond of any man, will not spare him
when he is in the wrong; for this, as I before observed, is the most
essential thing in history, to sacrifice to truth alone, and cast
away all care for everything else. The great universal rule and
standard is, to have regard not to those who read now, but to those
who are to peruse our works hereafter.

To speak impartially, the historians of former times were too often
guilty of flattery, and their works were little better than games