Quomodo historia conscribenda sit

Lucian of Samosata

Lucian, Vol. 6. Kilburn, K., translator. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.

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.” [*](These writers use words with a poetical tradition from Homer, Hesiod and other poets.) 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

v.6.p.35

a child, some Cupid [*](Little slave-boys were called “Cupids.”) —you may have seen one playing and putting on a huge mask of Heracles or a Titan. The audience there and then are calling out to them “a mountain was in labour.” 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,” [*](The opening of the Anabasis.) and other old writers, not knowing that there are such things as virtual prefaces [*](I.e., prefaces by function not by form.) 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

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by men of Edessa.” [*](Europus was actually situated on the Euphrates itself, on the farther shore from Mesopotamia.) Even this was not enough for him: my own birthplace, Samosata, this fine writer in the same book lifted, acropolis, walls and all, and transplanted to Mesopotamia, so as to surround it by both rivers, which passed close to it on either side and almost touched the walls. How ridiculous, Philo, if I were now to argue a proof with you that I am not a Parthian or from Mesopotamia, where this wonderful historian has taken and transplanted me!