How to write history (10-12)

Moreover, this too is worth saying: in history

complete fiction and praise that is heavily biased on one side does not even give pleasure to an audience, if you leave out the common rabble and take note of those who will listen in the spirit of judges and indeed of fault-finders as well. Nothing will get past their scrutiny: their eyes are keener than Argus’s and all over their body; they test each expression like a money-changer, rejecting at once what is false but accepting current coin that is legal tender and correctly minted. These are the people to keep in mind when you write history; do not give the slightest thought to the rest even if they burst themselves with applauding. But if you neglect them and sweeten your history beyond reason with stories and eulogies and the other kinds of flattery, you will make it like Heracles in Lydia. You have probably seen pictures of him as slave to Omphale, dressed in a most outlandish way: Omphale is wearing his lion’s skin and carrying his club in her hand, as if she were Heracles for certain, while he has on a saffron and purple gown and is carding wool and getting rapped with Omphale’s sandal. It’s a shocking spectacle: the clothing hangs off his body and is ill–fitting, and his divine masculinity is disgracefully feminised.

The majority will possibly applaud you for this, but those few whom you despise will laugh delightedly till they are sated when they see the incongruity, lack of proportion, and loose structure of the work, for each part has its own peculiar beauty and if you alter that you make it ugly and futile. I need not say that

eulogies may be pleasing to one man, him who is praised, and annoying to others, especially if they contain monstrous overstatements, the kind that most people make when they seek favour from those who are praised, persisting until they have made their flattery obvious to everyone. They do not know how to do it with any skill nor do they cover up their obsequiousness; no, they rush at it laying it all on thick, so implausible and so naïve. So they do not get what they want most: those they praise hate them the more and turn their backs on them as toadies, and rightly so, especially if they are manly in spirit.

That is what happened to Aristobulus when he wrote of the single combat between Alexander and Porus; he read this particular passage in his work to Alexander thinking to give great pleasure to the King by ascribing falsely to him certain deeds of valour and inventing achievements too great to be true. They happened to be sailing on the River Hydaspes at the time, and Alexander took the book and threw it straight into the water with the remark: “You deserve the same treatment, Aristobulus, for fighting single-handed duels for my sake like that and killing elephants with one throw of the javelin.” Indeed it was certain that Alexander would be angry at such a thing—he had not put up with the effrontery of the engineer who had promised to fashion Athos into his portrait and shape the mountain to the King’s likeness. Alexander at once realised that the man was a flatterer and had no longer employed him.