Plutarch, De gloria Atheniensium
Frank Cole Babbitt, Ed.

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.