32
This is the sort of nonsense they talk in floods through their lack of schooling. They neither see what is worth looking at nor, if they did see it, have they the ability to give it suitable expression. They invent and manufacture whatever “comes to the tip of an unlucky tongue,” as they say, and pride themselves in the number of their books and in particular on the titles, which again are completely ridiculous: “So-and-so’s Parthian victories in so many books”; and again: “Parthis I and II,” like “Atthis” of course. Someone else did it much more stylishly—I have read it myself—“The Parthonicica of Demetrius of Sagalassus” . . . There is a gap in the MSS here. not to make fun of them and pour scorn on histories so fine but with a practical end in view. For whoever avoids these faults and their like has already mastered a great part of what makes correct historical writing, or, rather, needs but little more, if logic is right when it says that to abolish one of two direct opposites is to establish the other instead.
33
Well now, someone will say, you have carefully cleared your ground and cut out all the thorns and brambles, and all the debris has been carried away and all the rough places are now smooth, so now build something yourself to show you are good not only at overturning other peoples’ edifices but at thinking out something clever yourself which no one, not even Momus, Momus was a literary personification of fault-finding—he appears in Lucian’s Zeus Rants, Loeb, vol. ii, p. 119. could censure.
