he who pursues them; all he can do is to wish well to, and
offer up his vows for them; but by passing over or contradicting
facts, he cannot alter or amend them. It would have been very easy
indeed for Thucydides, with a stroke of his pen, to have thrown down
the walls of Epipolis, sunk the vessel of Hermocrates, or made an
end of the execrable Gylippus, who stopped up all the avenues with
his walls and ditches; to have thrown the Syracusans on the
Lautumiae, and have let the Athenians go round Sicily and Italy,
according to the early hopes of Alcibiades: but what is past and
done Clotho cannot weave again, nor Atropos recall.

The only business of the historian is to relate things exactly as
they are: this he can never do as long as he is afraid of
Artaxerxes, whose physician {55a} he is; as long as he looks for the
purple robe, the golden chain, or the Nisaean horse, {55b} as the
reward of his labours; but Xenophon, that just writer, will not do
this, nor Thucydides. The good historian, though he may have
private enmity against any man, will esteem the public welfare of
more consequence to him, and will prefer truth to resentment; and,
on the other hand, be he ever so fond of any man, will not spare him
when he is in the wrong; for this, as I before observed, is the most
essential thing in history, to sacrifice to truth alone, and cast
away all care for everything else. The great universal rule and
standard is, to have regard not to those who read now, but to those
who are to peruse our works hereafter.

To speak impartially, the historians of former times were too often
guilty of flattery, and their works were little better than games
and sports, the effects of art. Of Alexander, this memorable saying
is recorded: "I should be glad," said he, "Onesicritus, after my
death, to come to life again for a little time, only to hear what
the people then living will say of me; for I am not surprised that
they praise and caress me now, as every one hopes by baiting well to
catch my favour." Though Homer wrote a great many fabulous things
concerning Achilles, the world was induced to believe him, for this
only reason, because they were written long after his death, and no
cause could be assigned why he should tell lies about him.

The good historian, {56} then, must be thus described: he must be
fearless, uncorrupted, free, the friend of truth and of liberty; one
who, to use the words of the comic poet, calls a fig