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For his style, I refer it to the judgment of divers ancient and competent judges. Plutarch in his book, De gloria Atheniensium, saith of him thus: Thucydides aimeth always at this; to make his auditor a spectator, and to cast his reader into the same passions that they were in that were beholders. The manner how Demosthenes arranged the Athenians on the rugged shore before Pylus; how Brasidas urged the steersman to run his galley aground; how he went to the ladder or place in the galley for descent; how he was hurt, and swooned, and fell down on the ledges of the galley; how the Spartans fought after the manner of a land-fight upon the sea, and the Athenians of a sea-fight upon land: again, in the Sicilian war, how a battle was fought by sea and land with equal fortune: these things, I say, are so described and so evidently set before our eyes, that the mind of the reader is no less affected therewith than if he had been present in the actions. There is for his perspicuity. Cicero in his book entitled Orator, speaking of the affection of divers Greek rhetoricians, saith thus: And therefore Herodotus and Thucydides are the more admirable. For though they lived in the same age with those I have before named, (meaning Thrasymachus, Gorgias, and Theodorus), yet were they far from this kind of delicacy, or rather indeed foolery. For the one without rub, gently glideth like a still river; and the other (meaning Thucydides) runs stronglier, and in matter of war, as it were, bloweth a trumpet of war. And in these two (as saith Theophrastus) history hath roused herself, and adventured to speak, but more copiously, and with more ornament than in those that were before them. This commends the gravity and the dignity of his language. Again in his second book, De Oratore, thus: Thucydides, in the art of speaking, hath in my opinion far exceeded them all. For he is so full of matter, that the number of his sentences doth almost reach to the number of his words; and in his words he is so apt and so close, that it is hard to say whether his words do more illustrate his sentences, or his sentences his words. There is for the pithiness and strength of his style. Lastly, for the purity and propriety, I cite Dionysius Halicarnassius: whose testimony is the stronger in this point, because he was a Greek rhetorician for his faculty, and for his affection, one that would no further commend him than of necessity he must. His words are these: There is one virtue in eloquence, the chiefest of all the rest, and without which there is no other goodness in speech. What is that? That the language be pure, and retain the propriety of the Greek tongue. This they both observe diligently. For Herodotus is the best rule of the Ionic, and Thucydides of the Attic dialect. These testimonies are not needful to him that hath read the history itself; nor at all, but that this same Dionysius hath taken so much pains, and applied so much of his faculty in rhetoric, to the extenuating of the worth thereof. Moreover, I have thought it necessary to take out the principal objections he maketh against him; and without many words of mine own to leave them to the consideration of the reader. And first, Dionysius saith thus: The principal and most necessary office of any man that intendeth to write a history, is to choose a noble argument, and grateful to such as shall read it. And this Herodotus, in my opinion, hath done better than Thucydides. For Herodotus hath written the joint history both of the Greeks and barbarians, to save from oblivion, &c. But Thucydides writeth one only war, and that neither honourable nor fortunate; which principally were to be wished never to have been; and next, never to have been remembered nor known to posterity. And that he took an evil argument in hand, he maketh it manifest in his proeme, saying: that many cities were in that war made desolate and utterly destroyed, partly by barbarians, partly by the Greeks themselves: so many banishments, and so much slaughter of men, as never was the like before, &c.: so that the hearers will abhor it at the first propounding. Now by how much it is better to write of the wonderful acts both of the barbarians and Grecians, than of the pitiful and horrible calamities of the Grecians; so much wiser is Herodotus in the choice of his argument than Thucydides.
