orations as they appear in Cicero. Livy makes his ancient
Romans wrangle and chop logic with all the subtlety of a Hortensius or a
Scaevola. And even in later days, when shorthand reporters attended the
debates of the senate and a Daily News was published in Rome, we find
that one of the most celebrated speeches in Tacitus (that in which the
Emperor Claudius gives the Gauls their freedom) is shown, by an
inscription discovered recently at Lugdunum, to be entirely fabulous.

Upon the other hand, it must be borne in mind that these speeches were
not intended to deceive; they were regarded merely as a certain dramatic
element which it was allowable to introduce into history for the purpose
of giving more life and reality to the narration, and were to be
criticised, not as we should, by arguing how in an age before shorthand
was known such a report was possible or how, in the failure of written
documents, tradition could bring down such an accurate verbal account,
but by the higher test of their psychological probability as regards the
persons in whose mouths they are placed. An ancient historian in answer
to modern criticism would say, probably, that these fictitious speeches
were in reality more truthful than the actual ones, just as Aristotle
claimed for poetry a higher degree of truth in comparison to history. The
whole point is interesting as showing how far in advance of his age
Polybius may be said to have been.

The last scientific historian, it is possible to gather from his writings
what he considered were the characteristics of the ideal writer of
history; and no small light will be thrown on the progress of historical
criticism if we strive to collect and analyse what in Polybius are more
or less scattered expressions. The ideal historian must be contemporary
with the events he describes, or removed from them by one generation
only. Where it is possible, he is to be an eye-witness of what he writes
of; where that is out of his power he is to test all traditions and
stories carefully and not to be ready to accept what is plausible in
place of what is true. He is to be no bookworm living aloof from the
experiences of the world in the artificial isolation of a university
town, but a politician, a soldier, and a traveller, a man not merely of
thought but of action, one who can do great things as well as write of
them, who in the sphere of history could be what Byron and AEschylus were
in the sphere of poetry