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Prefaces of this character have been employed by the best historians by Herodotus, 'to the end that what befell may not grow dim by lapse of time, seeing that it was great and wondrous, and showed forth withal Greeks vanquishing and barbarians vanquished'; and by Thucydides, 'believing that that war would be great and memorable beyond any previous one; for indeed great calamities took place during its course.
Now, Thucydides is not only a fellow-countryman and younger contemporary of Pericles, but he also sees in Pericles his ideal not only as a politician but evidently also as a man.
Among the wonderful characters of olden times we find Epictetus, Josephus, Strabo, Pliny, Seneca, Virgil, Aristotle, Plato, Tacitus, Thucydides and Herodotus. The "Speculation of Evolution of Species" was advocated among the Greeks six hundred years before the birth of Christ.
As soon, therefore, as he was grown up to man's estate, he began to go to law with his guardians, and to write orations against them; who, in the meantime, had recourse to various subterfuges and pleas for new trials, and Demosthenes, though he was thus, as Thucydides says, taught his business in dangers, and by his own exertions was successful in his suit, was yet unable for all this to recover so much as a small fraction of his patrimony.
If you think you are likely to make a good thing by employing an obscure publisher, with little or no capital, then, as some one in Thucydides remarks, congratulating you on your simplicity, I do not envy your want of common sense. Be very careful to enter into a perfectly preposterous agreement.
The Greeks had the power of putting things so as to make the greatest impression on the mind. This especially appears among such poets as Sophocles and Euripides, such orators as Pericles and Demosthenes, such historians as Xenophon and Thucydides, such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle.
Such was Thucydides. Although his work shows an advance, in the science of historical composition, over that of Herodotus, and his mind is of a higher, because of a more thoughtful order, yet his fame by no means obscures the glory which belongs to the Father of History.
A master of etiquette, he distributed approval and censure with impartial hand; and he was quick to condemn the smallest infraction of an ancient law. Nor was he insensible to the dignity of history. The best models were always before him. With admirable zeal he studied the manner of such masters as Thucydides and Titus Livius of Padua.
The elder wags go to his study and ask him to help them in hard bits of Herodotus or Thucydides: he says he will look over the passage, and flies for refuge to Mr. Prince, or to the crib. He keeps the flogging department in his own hands; finding that his son was too savage. He has awful brows and a big voice. But his roar frightens nobody. It is only a lion's skin; or, so to say, a muff.
The rule will be to reject every statement of legendary origin; nor does this apply only to narratives in legendary form: a narrative which has an historical appearance, but is founded on the data of legend, the opening chapters of Thucydides for example, ought equally to be discarded.
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