39
The historian’s sole task is to tell the tale as it happened. This he cannot do as long as he is afraid of Artaxerxes when he is his physician or hopes to get a purple cufta, A Median garment with sleeves. a gold necklet, and a Nisaean horse as a reward for the eulogies in his work. Referring to Ctesias of Cnidus. He spent seventeen years at court and wrote a history of Persia. No Xenophon (a just historian), no Thucydides will do that. On the contrary, even if he personally hates certain people he will think the public interest far more binding, and regard truth as worth more than enmity, and if he has a friend he will nevertheless not spare him if he errs.
40
This, as I have said, is the one thing peculiar to history, and only to Truth must sacrifice be made. When a man is going to write history, everything else he must ignore. In short, the one standard, the one yardstick is to keep in view not your present audience but those who will meet your work hereafter. Whoever serves the present will rightly be counted a flatterer—a person on whom history long ago right from the beginning has turned its back, as much as has physical culture on the art of make-up. For example they record this remark of Alexander’s: “I should be glad, Onesicritus,” he said, “to come back to life for a little while after my death to discover how men read these present events then. If now they praise and welcome them do not be surprised: they think, every one of them, that this is a fine bait to catch my goodwill.” Homer indeed in general tended towards the mythical in his account of Achilles, yet some nowadays are inclined to believe him; they cite as important evidence of his truthfulness the single fact that he did not write about him during his lifetime: they cannot find any motive for lying.
