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170 I thought he would be likely to express them, while at the same time I endeavored, as nearly as I could, to give the general purport of what was actually said." As to Professor Bury's interesting suggestion that the speeches composed in his more obscure manner contain more of what Thucydides thought was. "proper to the occasion," and those composed in his simpler manner more of "what was actually said," we may be somewhat skeptical. And summing the matter up, we may say that in Thucydides, as in Herodotus, for all their deficiencies, there are certain high qualities, and more in Thucydides and higher than in Herodotus, which have never been surpassed by writers of history. How potent still is the influence of Thucydides may be clearly seen by those who know him in the pages of Mr. Rhodes's great and now standard history of our Civil War. The interrupted task of Thucydides was completed by Xenophon, who tried to follow his methods and continue his spirit, but succeeded with only a faint success. The modern historian has nothing to learn from Xenophon that his master does not better teach, except, perhaps, in the matter of biography. The words of Grote are familiar: "It is at this point that we have to part company with the historian Thucydides. . . . The full extent of this irreparable loss can hardly be conceived. ... To pass from Thucydides to the Hellenica of Xenophon, is a descent truly mournful; and yet, when we look at Grecian history as a whole, we have great reason to rejoice that even so inferior a work as the latter has reached us." In Xenophon's completion of the history of the Peloponnesian War we welcome the method and manner of Thucydides, but we miss his discerning power, and, above all, his detachment. For Xenophon had only a mediocre talent, and besides was a partisan; a partisan, too, not of Athens, his native city, but of Sparta. And in his continuation of Greek history down to 362, we can never forgive him the distortion of view which elevates so unduly