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Again, you may see others writing introductions that are brilliant, dramatic, and excessively long, so that you expect what follows to be marvellous to hear, but for the body of their history they bring on something so tiny and so undistinguished that it resembles a child, some Cupid Little slave-boys were called “Cupids.” —you may have seen one playing and putting on a huge mask of Heracles or a Titan. The audience there and then are calling out to them “a mountain was in labour.”
23
In my opinion the right way to do it is not like this: there must be a general uniformity, a unity of colour, and the body must be in proportion with the head, so that when you get a golden helmet the breastplate is not a silly patchwork of rags or rotten hides with a wicker-work shield and pigskin greaves. You can see plenty of writers like that, who put the head of the Colossus of Rhodes on the body of a dwarf. Then again others produce bodies without any heads—works lacking an introduction that begin at once with the narrative; in support they quote Xenophon, where he begins “Darius and Parysatis had two sons,” The opening of the Anabasis. and other old writers, not knowing that there are such things as virtual prefaces I.e., prefaces by function not by form. unrecognised by most people; we shall demonstrate this elsewhere.
