10
Moreover, this too is worth saying: in history complete fiction and praise that is heavily biased on one side does not even give pleasure to an audience, if you leave out the common rabble and take note of those who will listen in the spirit of judges and indeed of fault-finders as well. Nothing will get past their scrutiny: their eyes are keener than Argus’s and all over their body; they test each expression like a money-changer, rejecting at once what is false but accepting current coin that is legal tender and correctly minted. These are the people to keep in mind when you write history; do not give the slightest thought to the rest even if they burst themselves with applauding. But if you neglect them and sweeten your history beyond reason with stories and eulogies and the other kinds of flattery, you will make it like Heracles in Lydia. You have probably seen pictures of him as slave to Omphale, dressed in a most outlandish way: Omphale is wearing his lion’s skin and carrying his club in her hand, as if she were Heracles for certain, while he has on a saffron and purple gown and is carding wool and getting rapped with Omphale’s sandal. It’s a shocking spectacle: the clothing hangs off his body and is ill–fitting, and his divine masculinity is disgracefully feminised.
