41
That, then, is the sort of man the historian should be: fearless, incorruptible, free, a friend of free expression and the truth, intent, as the comic poet Aristophanes, on the dubious authority of Tzetzes (see Kock, Comic. Graec. Fragm. III, p. 451). says, on calling a fig a fig and a trough a trough, giving nothing to hatred or to friendship, sparing no one, showing neither pity nor shame nor obsequiousness, an impartial judge, well disposed to all men up to the point of not giving one side more than its due, in his books a stranger and a man without a country, independent, subject to no sovereign, not reckoning what this or that man will think, but stating the facts.
42
Thucydides laid down this law very well: he distinguished virtue and vice in historical writing, when he saw Herodotus greatly admired to the point where his books were named after the Muses. For Thucydides says that he is writing a possession for evermore rather than a prize-essay for the occasion, that he does not welcome fiction but is leaving to posterity the true account of what happened. He brings in, too, the question of usefulness and what is, surely, the purpose of sound history: that if ever again men find themselves in a like situation they may be able, he says, from a consideration of the records of the past to handle rightly what now confronts them.
43
That then is the sort of mind the historian should have, please, when he comes along. Now as to his language and power of expression, he need not at the beginning of his work sharpen his teeth to perfect proficiency in that vehement, sharp-fanged style that you know, packed with periods, and intricate with logical reasoning or other features of clever rhetoric. No, his tone should be more pacific, his thought coherent and well-knit, his language exact and statesmanlike, of a kind to set forth the subject with the utmost clarity and accuracy.
