Trips to the Moon, of Samosata Lucian [ap literature book list TXT] 📗

when she adds pleasure to utility, may attract more admirers; though as long as she is possessed of that greatest of perfections, truth, she need not be anxious concerning beauty.

In history, nothing fabulous can be agreeable; and flattery is disgusting to all readers, except the very dregs of the people; good judges look with the eyes of Argus on every part, reject everything that is false and adulterated, and will admit nothing but what is true, clear, and well expressed.  These are the men you are to have a regard to when you write, rather than the vulgar, though your flattery should delight them ever so much.  If you stuff history with fulsome encomiums and idle tales, you will make her like Hercules in Lydia, as you may have seen him painted, waiting upon Omphale, who is dressed in the lion’s skin, with his club in her hand; whilst he is represented clothed in yellow and purple, and spinning, and Omphale beating him with her slipper; a ridiculous spectacle, wherein everything manly and godlike is sunk and degraded to effeminacy.

The multitude perhaps, indeed, may admire such things; but the judicious few whose opinion you despise will always laugh at what is absurd, incongruous, and inconsistent.  Everything has a beauty peculiar to itself; but if you put one instead of another, the most beautiful becomes ugly, because it is not in its proper place.  I need not add, that praise is agreeable only to the person praised, and disgustful to everybody else, especially when it is lavishly bestowed; as is the practice of most writers, who are so extremely desirous of recommending themselves by flattery, and dwell so much upon it as to convince the reader it is mere adulation, which they have not art enough to conceal, but heap up together, naked, uncovered, and totally incredible, so that they seldom gain what they expected from it; for the person flattered, if he has anything noble or manly in him, only abhors and despises them for it as mean parasites.  Aristobulus, after he had written an account of the single combat between Alexander and Porus, showed that monarch a particular part of it, wherein, the better to get into his good graces, he had inserted a great deal more than was true; when Alexander seized the book and threw it (for they happened at that time to be sailing on the Hydaspes) directly into the river: “Thus,” said he, “ought you to have been served yourself for pretending to describe my battles, and killing half a dozen elephants for me with a single spear.”  This anger was worthy of Alexander, of him who could not bear the adulation of that architect {29} who promised to transform Mount Athos into a statue of him; but he looked upon the man from that time as a base flatterer, and never employed him afterwards.

What is there in this custom, therefore, that can be agreeable, unless to the proud and vain; to deformed men or ugly women, who insist on being painted handsome, and think they shall look better if the artist gives them a little more red and white!  Such, for the most part, are the historians of our times, who sacrifice everything to the present moment and their own interest and advantage; who can only be despised as ignorant flatterers of the age they live in; and as men, who, at the same time, by their extravagant stories, make everything which they relate liable to suspicion.  If notwithstanding any are still of opinion, that the agreeable should be admitted in history, let them join that which is pleasant with that which is true, by the beauties of style and diction, instead of foisting in, as is commonly done, what is nothing to the purpose.

I will now acquaint you with some things I lately picked up in Ionia and Achaia, from several historians, who gave accounts of this war.  By the graces I beseech you to give me credit for what I am going to tell you, as I could swear to the truth of it, if it were polite to swear in a dissertation.  One of these gentlemen begins by invoking the Muses, and entreats the goddesses to assist him in the performance.  What an excellent setting out and how properly is this form of speech adapted to history!  A little farther on, he compares our emperor to Achilles, and the Persian king to Thersites; not considering that his Achilles would have been a much greater man if he had killed Hector rather than Thersites; if the brave should fly, he who pursues must be braver.  Then follows an encomium on himself, showing how worthy he is to recite such noble actions; and when he is got on a little, he extols his own country, Miletus, adding that in this he had acted better than Homer, who never tells us where he was born.  He informs us, moreover, at the end of his preface, in the most plain and positive terms, that he shall take care to make the best he can of our own affairs, and, as far as lies in his power, to get the upper hand of our enemies the barbarians.  After investigating the cause of the war, he begins thus: “That vilest of all wretches, Vologesus, entered upon the war for these reasons.”  Such is this historian’s manner.  Another, a close imitator of Thucydides, that he may set out as his master does, gives us an exordium that smells of the true Attic honey, and begins thus: “Creperius Calpurnianus, a citizen of Pompeia, hath written the history of the war between the Parthians and the Romans, showing how they fought with one another, commencing at the time when it first broke out.”  After this, need I inform you how he harangued in Armenia, by another Corcyræan orator? or how, to be revenged of the Nisibæans for not taking part with the Romans, he sent the plague amongst them, taking the whole from Thucydides, excepting the long walls of Athens.  He had begun from Æthiopia, descended into Egypt, and passed over great part of the royal territory.  Well it was that he stopped there.  When I left him, he was burying the miserable Athenians at Nisibis; but as I knew what he was going to tell us, I took my leave of him.

Another thing very common with these historians is, by way of imitating Thucydides, to make use of his phrases, perhaps with a little alteration, to adopt his manner, in little modes and expressions, such as, “you must yourself acknowledge,” “for the same reason,” “a little more, and I had forgot,” and the like.  This same writer, when he has occasion to mention bridges, fosses, or any of the machines used in war, gives them Roman names; but how does it suit the dignity of history, or resemble Thucydides, to mix the Attic and Italian thus, as if it was ornamental and becoming?

Another of them gives us a plain simple journal of everything that was done, such as a common soldier might have written, or a sutler who followed the camp.  This, however, was tolerable, because it pretended to nothing more; and might be useful by supplying materials for some better historian.  I only blame him for his pompous introduction: “Callimorphus, physician to the sixth legion of spearmen, his history of the Parthian war.”  Then his books are all carefully numbered, and he entertains us with a most frigid preface, which he concludes with saying that “a physician must be the fittest of all men to write history, because Æsculapius was the son of Apollo, and Apollo is the leader of the Muses, and the great prince of literature.”

Besides this, after setting out in delicate Ionic, he drops, I know not how, into the most vulgar style and expressions, used only by the very dregs of the people.

And here I must not pass over a certain wise man, whose name, however, I shall not mention; his work is lately published at Corinth, and is beyond everything one could have conceived.  In the very first sentence of his preface he takes his readers to task, and convinces them by the most sagacious method of reasoning that “none but a wise man should ever attempt to write history.”  Then comes syllogism upon syllogism; every kind of argument is by turns made use of, to introduce the meanest and most fulsome adulation; and even this is brought in by syllogism and interrogation.  What appeared to me the most intolerable and unbecoming the long beard of a philosopher, was his saying in the preface that our emperor was above all men most happy, whose actions even philosophers did not disdain to celebrate; surely this, if it ought to be said at all, should have been left for us to say rather than himself.

Neither must we here forget that historian who begins thus: “I come to speak of the Romans and Persians;” and a little after he says, “for the Persians ought to suffer;” and in another place, “there was one Osroes, whom the Greeks call Oxyrrhoes,” with many things of this kind.  This man is just such a one as him I mentioned before, only that one is like Thucydides, and the other the exact resemblance of Herodotus.

But there is yet another writer, renowned for eloquence, another Thucydides, or rather superior to him, who most elaborately describes every city, mountain, field, and river, and cries out with all his might, “May the great averter of evil turn it all on our enemies!”  This is colder than Caspian snow, or Celtic ice.  The emperor’s shield takes up a whole book to describe.  The Gorgon’s {35} eyes are blue, and black, and white; the serpents twine about his hair, and his belt has all the colours of the rainbow.  How many thousand lines does it cost him to describe Vologesus’s breeches and his horse’s bridle, and how Osroes’ hair looked when he swam over the Tigris, what sort of a cave he fled into, and how it was shaded all over with ivy, and myrtle, and laurel, twined together.  You plainly see how necessary this was to the history, and that we could not possibly have understood what was going forward without it.

From inability, and ignorance of everything useful, these men are driven to descriptions of countries and caverns, and when they come into a multiplicity of great and momentous affairs, are utterly at a loss.  Like a servant enriched on a sudden by coming into his master’s estate, who does not know how to put on his clothes, or to eat as he should do; but when fine birds, fat sows, and hares are placed before him, falls to and eats till he bursts, of salt meat and pottage.  The writer I just now mentioned describes the strangest wounds, and the most extraordinary deaths you ever heard of; tells us of a man’s being wounded in the great toe, and expiring immediately; and how on Priscus, the general, bawling out loud, seven-and-twenty of the enemy fell down dead upon the spot.  He has told lies, moreover, about the number of the slain, in contradiction to the account given in by the leaders.  He will have it that seventy thousand two hundred and thirty-six of the enemy died at Europus, and of the Romans only two, and nine wounded.  Surely nobody in their senses can bear this.

Another thing should be mentioned here also, which is no little fault.  From the affectation of Atticism, and a more than ordinary attention to purity of diction, he has taken the liberty to turn the Roman names into Greek, to call Saturninus, Κρονιος , Chronius; Fronto, Φροντις, Frontis; Titianus, Τιτανιος , Titanius, and others still more ridiculous.  With regard to the death of Severian, he informs us that everybody else was mistaken when they imagined that he perished by the sword, for that the man starved himself to death, as he thought that the easiest way of dying; not knowing (which was the case) that he could only have fasted three days, whereas many have lived without food for seven; unless we are to suppose that Osroes stood waiting till Severian had starved himself completely, and for that reason he would not live out the whole week.

But in what class, my dear Philo, shall we rank those historians who are perpetually making use of poetical expressions, such as “the engine crushed, the wall thundered,” and in another place, “Edessa resounded with the shock of arms, and all was noise and tumult around;” and again, “often the leader in his mind revolved how best he might approach the wall.”  At the same time amongst these were interspersed some of the meanest and most beggarly phrases, such as “the leader of the army epistolised his master,” “the soldiers bought utensils,” “they washed and waited on them,” with many other things of the same kind, like a tragedian with a high cothurnus on one foot