How to write history (21-25)

There is another not unimportant matter: because he is an out-and-out Atticist and has purified his speech down to the last syllable, he thought fit to change the Latin names and use Greek forms—Kronios for Saturninus, Phrontis for Fronto, Titanios for Titianus, and others much more ridiculous.

And where, my dear Philo, are we to put those who use poetic words in their history, who say “The siege-engine whirled, the wall fell with a big thud,” and again in another part of this fine work, “Edessa thus was girt with the crash of arms and all was clangour and alarum,” and “the general mused how best to attack the wall.” [*] Then in the middle of this sort of thing he stuffed a lot of words that were cheap, vulgar, and mean—“the prefect sent His Majesty a despatch” and “the soldiers got themselves the necessaries” and “by now they’d had their baths and were hanging about” and so on. It’s as if a tragic actor had mounted a high buskin on one foot and had a sandal tied under the other.

Again, you may see others writing introductions that are brilliant, dramatic, and excessively long, so that you expect what follows to be marvellous to hear, but for the body of their history they bring on something so tiny and so undistinguished that it resembles

In my opinion the right way to do it is not like this: there must be a general uniformity, a unity of colour, and the body must be in proportion with the head, so that when you get a golden helmet the breastplate is not a silly patchwork of rags or rotten hides with a wicker-work shield and pigskin greaves. You can see plenty of writers like that, who put the head of the Colossus of Rhodes on the body of a dwarf. Then again others produce bodies without any heads—works lacking an introduction that begin at once with the narrative; in support they quote Xenophon, where he begins “Darius and Parysatis had two sons,” [*] and other old writers, not knowing that there are such things as virtual prefaces [*] unrecognised by most people; we shall demonstrate this elsewhere.

Yet we can put up with all these things as far as they are faults of expression and arrangement of material; but to misplace localities even, not just by parasangs but by whole days’ marches, what fineness of style does that resemble? One man, for example, who had never met a Syrian nor even heard as they say “barber-shop gossip” about such things, assembled his facts so carelessly that when speaking of Europus he said: “Europus is situated in Mesopotamia, two days’ journey from the Euphrates; it was colonised

By Zeus, that, too, is a highly plausible story the same fellow told about Severianus, taking his oath that he heard it from a man who had survived this very action: he said that Severianus did not want to die by the sword nor take poison nor hang himself, but thought of a dramatic death, strange and novel in its boldness: he happened to have huge drinking-glasses of the finest crystal, and when he had decided to die at all costs he broke the largest of the bowls and used one of the pieces to kill himself by cutting his throat with the glass. As if there were no dagger, no javelin to be found to bring him a manly and heroic death! .