Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/508

486 486 HISTORY OF THE Xenophon : only we must not seek to raise any doubt as to the genuine- ness of the Vlllth book ; all that we are entitled to do is to explain, on this hypothesis, certain differences in the composition, and to infer from this that the work wants the last touches of the master's hand.* § 6. We cannot form any opinion as to the manner in which Thucy- dides collected, compared, examined, and put together his materials, for the oral traditions of the time are lost : but, if perfect clearness in the narrative ; if the consistency of every detail as well with other parts of the history as with all we know from other sources of the state of affairs at that time ; if the harmony of all that he tells with the laws of nature and with the known characters of the persons of whom he writes ; if all this furnishes a security for the truth and fidelity of an historian, we have this guarantee in its most ample form in the work of Thucydides. The ancients, who were very strict in estimating the characters of their own historians, and who had questioned the veracity of most of them, are unanimous in recognizing the accuracy and trustworthiness of Thucy- dides, and the plan of his work, considered in the spirit of a rhetorician of the time, fully justifies his principle of keeping to a statement of the truth •: even the singular reproach that he has chosen too melancholy a subject, and that he has not considered the glory of his countrymen in this selection, becomes, when properly considered, an encomium on his strict historical fidelity. The deviations of later historians, especially Diodorus and Plutarch, upon close scrutiny, confirm the accuracy of Thucydides ; t and, in all the points of contact between them, in charac- terizing the statesmen of the day and in describing the position of Athens at different times, Thucydides and Aristophanes have all the agreement which we could expect between the bold caricatures of the comedian and the accurate pictures of the historian. Indeed we will venture to say, that there is no period of history which stands before us with the same distinctness with which the first twenty-one years of the Peloponnesian war are presented to us in the work of Thucydides, where we are led through every circumstance in all its essential details, in its grounds and occasion, in its progress and results, with the utmost confidence in the guiding hand of the historian. The only thing similar to it in Roman history is Sallust's account of the Jugurthan war and of the Catilinarian conspiracy. The remains of Tacitus' contemporary history (the His- tories), although equally complete in the details, are very inferior in clear and definite narratives of fact. Tacitus hastens from one exciting occurrence to another, without waiting to give an adequate account of f Diodorus, in the history of the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, though he adopts the annalistic mode of reckoning, is far from being as exact as Thucydides, who only gives a few notes of time. All that we can use in Diodorus is his leading dates, successions of kings, years of the deaths of individuals, &c.
 * On the speeches wanting in this book, see below, {» 11.