How to write history (40-42)

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

That, then, is the sort of man the historian should be: fearless, incorruptible, free, a friend of free expression and the truth, intent, as the comic poet [*] says, on calling a fig a fig and a trough a trough, giving nothing to hatred or to friendship, sparing no one, showing neither pity nor shame nor obsequiousness, an impartial judge, well disposed to all men up to the point of not giving one side more than its due, in his books a stranger and a man without a country, independent, subject to no sovereign, not reckoning what this or that man will think, but stating the facts.

Thucydides laid down this law very well: he distinguished virtue and vice in historical writing, when he saw Herodotus greatly admired to the point where his books were named after the Muses. For Thucydides says that he is writing a possession for evermore rather than a prize-essay for the occasion, that he does not welcome fiction but is leaving to posterity the true account of what happened. He brings in, too, the question of usefulness and what is, surely, the purpose of sound history: that if ever again men find themselves in a like situation they may be