3
Simonides, however, calls painting inarticulate poetry and poetry articulate painting: Cf. Moralia, 18 a. for the actions which painters portray as taking place at the moment literature narrates and records after they have taken place. Even though artists with colour and design, and writers with words and phrases, represent the same subjects, they differ in the material and the manner of their imitation; and yet the underlying end and aim of both is one and the same; the most effective historian is he who, by a vivid representation of emotions and characters, makes his narration like a painting. Assuredly Thucydides Cf. Life of Nicias, chap. i. (523 c); Longinus, On the Sublime, chap. xxv. is always striving for this vividness in his writing, since it is his desire to make the reader a spectator, as it were, and to produce vividly in the minds of those who peruse his narrative the emotions of amazement and consternation which were experienced by those who beheld them. For he tells how Demosthenes Cf. Thucydides, iv. 10-12. is drawing up the Athenians at the very edge of the breakwater at Pylos, and Brasidas is urging on his pilot to beach the ship, and is hurrying to the landing-plank, and is wounded and falls fainting on the forward-deck; and the Spartans are fighting an infantry engagement from the sea, while the Athenians wage a naval battle from the land. Again, in his account of the Sicilian Cf. Thucydides, vii. 71; in the next two sentences the text is very uncertain and can only be restored with great hesitation. expedition: The armies of both sides on the land, as long as the fighting at sea is evenly balanced, are enduring an unceasing struggle and tension of mind because of their battling forces; and because of the continued indecisiveness of the struggle they accompany it in an extremity of fear, with their very bodies swaying in sympathy with their opinion of the outcome. Such a description is characterized by pictorial vividness both in its arrangement and in its power of description; so, if it be unworthy to compare painters with generals, let us not compare historians either.
