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Simonides, however, calls painting inarticulate
poetry and poetry articulate painting:1 for the
actions which painters portray as taking place at the
moment literature narrates and records after they
have taken place. Even though artists with colour
and design, and writers with words and phrases,
represent the same subjects, they differ in the
material and the manner of their imitation ; and yet
the underlying end and aim of both is one and the
same; the most effective historian is he who, by a vivid
representation of emotions and characters, makes his
narration like a painting. Assuredly Thucydides2 is
always striving for this vividness in his writing, since it
is his desire to make the reader a spectator, as it were,
and to produce vividly in the minds of those who
peruse his narrative the emotions of amazement
and consternation which were experienced by those
who beheld them. For he tells how Demosthenes3 is
[p. 503]
drawing up the Athenians at the very edge of the
breakwater at Pylos, and Brasidas is urging on his pilot
to beach the ship, and is hurrying to the landing-plank,
and is wounded and falls fainting on the forward-deck;
and the Spartans are fighting an infantry engagement from the sea, while the Athenians wage a naval
battle from the land. Again, in his account of the
Sicilian4 expedition : ‘The armies of both sides on
the land, as long as the fighting at sea is evenly
balanced, are enduring an unceasing struggle and
tension of mind’ because of their battling forces ;
and ‘because of the continued indecisiveness of the
struggle they accompany it in an extremity of fear,
with their very bodies swaying in sympathy with
their opinion of the outcome.’ Such a description
is characterized by pictorial vividness both in its
arrangement and in its power of description ; so, if
it be unworthy to compare painters with generals, let
us not compare historians either.
Again, the news of the battle of Marathon Thersippus of Eroeadae brought back, as Heracleides
Pontieus relates ; but most historians declare that it
was Eucles who ran in full armour, hot from the battle,
and, bursting in at the doors of the first men of the
State, could only say, ‘Hail ! we are victorious !’
5
[p. 505]
and straightway expired. Yet this man carne as a
self-sent messenger regarding a battle in which he
himself had fought; but suppose that some goatherd
or shepherd upon a hill or a height had been a distant
spectator of the contest and had looked down upon
that great event, too great for any tongue to teli, and
had come to the city as a messenger, a man who had
not felt a wound nor shed a drop of blood, and yet
had insisted that he have such honours as Cynegeirus
received, or Callimachus, or Polyzelus, because, forsooth, he had reported their deeds of valour, their
wounds and death ; would he not have been thought
of surpassing impudence? Why, as we are told,
the Spartans merely sent meat from the public
commons to the man who brought glad tidings of the
victory in Mantineia which Thucydides6 describes !
And indeed the compilers of histories are, as it were,
reporters of great exploits who are gifted with the
faculty of felicitous speech, and achieve success in
their writing through the beauty and force of their
narration ; and to them those who first encountered
and recorded the events are indebted for a pleasing
retelling of them. We may be sure that such writers
are lauded also merely through being remembered
and read because of the men who won success ; for
the words do not create the deeds, but because of the
deeds they are also deemed worthy of being read.
1 Cf. Moralia, 18 a.
2 Cf. Life of Nicias, chap. i. (523 c); Longinus, On the Sublime, chap. xxv.
3 Cf. Thucydides, iv. 10-12.
4 Cf. Thucydides, vii. 71; in the next two sentences the text is very uncertain and can only be restored with great hesitation.
5 Cf. Lucian, Pro Lapsu inter Salutandum, 3; and F. G. Allinson in the Classical Weekly, xxiv. p. 152.
6 Cf. Thucydides, v. 65-73; Life of Agesilaüs, chap. xxxiii. (614f).