ur day." The
orator was surprised to find how much of the oration could be used
bodily, and how much, with adaptation, was germane to his subject. But
slight alterations are necessary to make the opening sentence this:
"Most of those who have spoken here have commended the law-giver who
added this oration to our other customs; it seemed to them a worthy
thing that such an honor should be given to the dead who have fallen on
the field of battle." In many places you may let the speech run on with
hardly a change. "In the face of death [these men] resolved to rely upon
themselves alone. And when the moment came they were minded to resist
and suffer rather than to fly and save their lives; they ran away from
the word of dishonor, but on the battlefield their feet stood fast; and
while for a moment they were in the hands of fortune, at the height, not
of terror, but of glory, they passed away. Such was the end of these
men; they were worthy of their country."

Consider for a moment, as the work of a contemporary, the book which
continues the account of the Sicilian expedition, and ends with the
disaster at Syracuse. "In the describing and reporting whereof,"
Plutarch writes, "Thucydides hath gone beyond himself, both for variety
and liveliness of narration, as also in choice and excellent words."
"There is no prose composition in the world," wrote Macaulay, "which I
place so high as the seventh book of Thucydides.... I was delighted to
find in Gray's letters, the other day, this query to Wharton: 'The
retreat from Syracuse,--is it or is it not the finest thing you ever
read in your life?'" In the Annals of Tacitus we have an account of part
of the reign of Emperor Nero, which is intense in its interest as the
picture of a state of society that would be incredible, did we not know
that our guide was a truthful man. One rises from a perusal of this with
the trite expression, "Truth is stranger than fiction;" and one need
only compare the account of Tacitus with the romance of Quo Vadis to be
convinced that true history is more interesting than a novel. One of
the most vivid impressions I ever had came immediately after reading the
story of Nero and Agrippina in Tacitus, from a view of the statue of
Agrippina in the National Museum at Naples.[2]

It will be worth our while now to sum up what I think may be established
with sufficient time and care. Natural ability being presupposed, the
qualities necessary for a historian are