The Way To Write History (22-24)

Then, Philo, how shall we class the historians who indulge in poetical phraseology? ‘The catapult rocked responsive,’ they say; ‘Loud thundered the breach’; or, somewhere else in this delectable history, ‘Thus Edessa was girdled with clash of arms, and all was din and turmoil,’ or, ‘The general pondered in his heart how to attack the wall? Only he fills up the interstices with such wretched common lower-class phrases as ‘The military prefect wrote His Majesty,’ ‘The troops were procuring the needful,’ ‘They got a wash[*] and put in an appearance,’ and so on, It is like an actor with one foot raised on a high buskin, and the other in a slipper.

You will find others writing brilliant high-sounding prefaces of outrageous length, raising great expectations of the wonders” to follow—and then comes a poor little appendix of a—history; it is like nothing in the world but a child—say the Eros you must have seen in a picture playing in an enormous mask of Heracles or a Titan; parturiunt montes, cries the audience, very naturally. That is not the way to do things; the whole should be homogeneous and uniform, and the body in proportion to the head—not a helmet of gold, a ridiculous breastplate patched up out of rags or rotten leather, shield of wicker, and pig-skin greaves. You will find plenty of historians prepared. to set the Rhodian Colossus’s head on the body of a dwarf; others on the contrary show us headless bodies, and plunge into the facts without exordium. These plead the example of Xenophon, who starts with ‘Darius and Parysatis had two children’; if they only knewit, there is such a thing as a virtual exordium, not realized as such by everybody;_ but of that hereafter.

However, any mistake in mere expression or arrangement is excusable; but when you come to fancy geography, differing from the other not by miles or leagues, but by whole days’ journeys, where is the classical model for that? One writer has taken so little trouble with his facts—never met a Syrian, I suppose, nor listened to the stray information you may pick up at the barber’s—, that he thus locates Europus:—‘Europus lies in Mesopotamia, two days’ journey from the Euphrates, and is a colony from Edessa.’ Not content with that, this enterprising person has in the same book taken up my native Samosata and shifted it, citadel, walls, and all, into Mesopotamia, giving it the two rivers for boundaries, and making them shave past it, all but touching the walls on either side. I suspect you would laugh at me, Philo, if I were to set about convincing you that I am neither Parthian nor Mesopotamian, as this whimsical colony-planter makes me.