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Faithfully to represent his subject, adequately to express his own conceptions, to make plain all that might be obscure; these are the first essentials for the pantomime, to whom no higher compliment could be paid than Thucydides's tribute to Pericles, who, he says, 'could not only conceive a wise policy, but render it intelligible to his hearers'; the intelligibility, in the present case, depending on clearness of gesticulation.
The sojourn in Sicily must have been dull. He was stationed at Syracuse, but his school training had not gone deep enough to interest him in Thucydides's marvellous story of the siege of that place or in the antiquities of Sicily. The chief surviving record of his sojourn in Sicily is an account from his washerwoman, "Mrs. De Lass," dated at Syracuse the 8th of March, 1809.
Thus, there is a great want of the particulars of time, place, and persons in Manetho's account of the Egyptian Dynasties, Etesias's of the Assyrian Kings, and those which the technical chronologers have given of the ancient kingdoms of Greece; and, agreeably thereto, the accounts have much fiction and falsehood, with some truth: whereas Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, and Caesar's of the War in Gaul, in both which the particulars of time, place, and persons are mentioned, are universally esteemed true to a great degree of exactness."
The subject was suited to De Quincey's imagination. It was like one of his own opium visions, and he handled it with a dignity and force which make the history not altogether unworthy of comparison with Thucydides's great chapter on the Sicilian Expedition.
XIV. When the speakers of Thucydides's party complained that Perikles had wasted the public money, and destroyed the revenue, he asked the people in the assembly whether they thought he had spent much. When they answered "Very much indeed," he said in reply, "Do not, then, put it down to the public account, but to mine; and I will inscribe my name upon all the public buildings."
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