3
As I saw and heard all this, friend, I was reminded of the story of the man of Sinope. When Philip was said to be already on the march, all the Corinthians were astir and busy, preparing weapons, bringing up stones, underpinning the wall, shoring up a battlement and doing various other useful jobs. Diogenes saw this, and as he had nothing to do—nobody made any use of him—he belted up his philosopher’s cloak and very busily by himself rolled the crock in which, as it happens, he was living up and down Cornel Hill. When one of his friends asked: “Why are you doing that, Diogenes?” he replied: “I’m rolling the crock so as not to be thought the one idle man in the midst of all these workers.”
4
So in my own case, Philo, to avoid being the only mute in such a polyphonic time, pushed about open-mouthed without a word like an extra in a comedy, I thought it a good idea to roll my barrel as best I could; not to produce a history or even merely chronicle the events—I’m not so bold as that: don’t be afraid that I should go that far. I know the danger of rolling it over rocks, particularly a poorly baked little barrel like mine. Just as soon as it hits against a tiny piece of stone we shall have to pick up the pieces.
4
I shall tell you then what I have decided to do and how I shall take part in the war in safety, keeping well out of range myself. “From your spray and surge’’ Homer, Od. xii, 198, describing the whirlpool of Charybdis. and all the cares that attend the writer of history I shall keep myself aloof and rightly so. In fact, I shall offer a little advice and these few precepts to historians, so that I may share in the erection of their building, if not the inscription on it, by putting at any rate my finger-tip on the mortar.
