Thucydides has one consolation which is not always present to the student of a difficult writer. He knows that he is not engaged in the hopeless or thankless task of unravelling a mere rhetorical tangle. Every new light on the thought is sure to be a new light on the words[1].
§ 12. The practice of introducing speeches was continued through the whole series of Greek and Roman historians, and, owing to its classical prestige, even maintained itself for a time in modern literature. But it is curious to trace the process by which it was gradually estranged from the spirit and significance of its origin. For Xenophon, the idea of portraying character in deed and in word was as natural as for Thucydides. Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, with all their differences, alike belong to an age in which the historian draws from life and for life, setting forth what has been done and said, but rarely theorising or commenting. In the political life which Thucydides and Xenophon represent, public speech
- ↑ Jelf (following Kühner) rightly classes Thucydides with those writers who, "engrossed vvith the subject, were overpowered by their flow of thought, and endeavouring to concentrate these notions in all their fulness in as few words as possible, passed from thought to thought, without taking much care that the several parts of the whole sentence should be connected together with a strict grammatical accuracy." The constructions of Thucydides, he adds, "in spite of, or perhaps because of, their grammatical inaccuracy, have a power and depth of expression which perhaps no other prose writer ever attained." (Greek Grammar, ii. 593.)—Thucydides wishes his thought to be what Aristotle requires in the period (Rhet. iii. 9)—εὐσύνοπτον. Cp. Attic Orators, i. 35.
