ok beyond composition, and
the contemporary of Voltaire's _Essai sur les Moeurs_ (1754-1757)
might have been expected to know that the profitable experience of the
human race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic. Among
the ancient historians, he counted Thucydides to be the true model,
because he reports facts without judging, and omits none of the
circumstances proper for enabling us to judge of them for
ourselves--though how Rousseau knew what facts Thucydides has omitted,
I am unable to divine. Then come Caesar's Commentaries and Xenophon's
Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The good Herodotus, without portraits and
without maxims, but abounding in details the most capable of
interesting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of historians, if
only these details did not so often degenerate into puerilities. Livy
is unsuited to youth, because he is political and a rhetorician.
Tacitus is the book of the old; you must have learnt the art of
reading facts, before you can be trusted with maxims.

The drawback of histories such as those of Thucydides and Caesar,
Rousseau admits to be that they dwell almost entirely on war, leaving
out the true life of nations, which belongs to the unwritten
chronicles of peace. This leads him to the equally just reflection
that historians while recounting facts omit the gradual and
progressive causes which led to them. "They often find in a battle
lost or won the reason of a revolution, which even before the battle
was already inevitable. War scarcely does more than bring into full
light events determined by moral causes, which historians can seldom
penetrate."[316] A third complaint against the study which he began by
recommending as a proper introduction to the knowledge of man, is that
it does not present men but actions, or at least men only in their
parade costume and in certain chosen moments, and he justly reproaches
writers alike of history and biography, for omitting those trifling
strokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal the true physiognomy of
character. "Remain then for ever, without bowels, without nature;
harden your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency, and make
yourselves despicable by force of dignity."[317] And so after all, by
a common stroke of impetuous inconsistency, he forsakes history, and
falls back upon the ancient biographies, because, all the low and
familiar details being banished from modern style, however true and
characteristic, men are a