and sports, the effects of art. Of Alexander, this memorable saying
is recorded: "I should be glad," said he, "Onesicritus, after my
death, to come to life again for a little time, only to hear what
the people then living will say of me; for I am not surprised that
they praise and caress me now, as every one hopes by baiting well to
catch my favour." Though Homer wrote a great many fabulous things
concerning Achilles, the world was induced to believe him, for this
only reason, because they were written long after his death, and no
cause could be assigned why he should tell lies about him.

The good historian, {56} then, must be thus described: he must be
fearless, uncorrupted, free, the friend of truth and of liberty; one
who, to use the words of the comic poet, calls a fig a fig, {57a}
and a skiff a skiff, neither giving nor withholding from any, from
favour or from enmity, not influenced by pity, by shame, or by
remorse; a just judge, so far benevolent to all as never to give
more than is due to any in his work; a stranger to all, of no
country, bound only by his own laws, acknowledging no sovereign,
never considering what this or that man may say of him, but relating
faithfully everything as it happened.

This rule therefore Thucydides observed, distinguishing properly the
faults and perfections of history: not unmindful of the great
reputation which Herodotus had acquired, insomuch that his books
were called by the names of the Muses. {57b} Thucydides tells us
that he "wrote for posterity, and not for present delight; that he
by no means approved of the fabulous, but was desirous of delivering
down the truth alone to future ages." It is the useful, he adds,
which must constitute the merit of history, that by the
retrospection of what is past, when similar events occur, men may