The defects of Thucydides are evident; his style is harsh, obscure and crabbed; it is sometimes said that he seems wiser than he really is mainly because his language is difficult; that if his thoughts were translated into easier prose our impressions of his greatness would be much modified. Yet it is to be remembered that he, like Lucretius, had to create his own vocabulary. It is a remarkable fact that prose has been far more difficult to invent than poetry, for precision is essential to it as the language of reasoning rather than of feeling. Instead of finding fault with a medium which was necessarily imperfect because it was an innovation we should be thankful for what it has actually accomplished. It is not always obscure; at times, when "the lion laughed" as an old commentator says, he is almost unmatched in pure narrative, notably in his rapid summary of the Athenian rise to power in the first book and in the immortal Syracusan tragedy of the seventh. His merits are many and great; his conciseness, repression of personal feeling, love of accuracy, careful research, unwillingness to praise overmuch and his total absence of preconceived opinion testify to an honesty of outlook rare in classical historians. Because he feels certain of his detachment of view, he quite confidently undertakes what few would have faced, the writing of contemporary history. Nowadays historians do not trust themselves; we may expect a faithful account of our Great War some fifty years hence, if ever. Not so Thucydides; he claims that his work will be a treasure for all time; had any other written these words we should have dismissed them as an idle boast. For he is the first man to respect history. It was not a plaything; it was worthy of being elevated to the rank of a science. As such, its events must have some deep causes behind them, worth discovering not only in themselves as keys to one particular period, but as possible explanations of similar events in distant ages. Accordingly, he deemed it necessary to study first of all our human nature, its varied motives, mostly of questionable morality, next he studied international ethics, based frankly on expediency. The results of these researches he has embodied (with one or two exceptions) in his famous speeches. He surveyed the ground on which battles were fought; he examined inscriptions, copying them with scrupulous care; he criticised ancient history and contemporary versions of famous events, many of which he found to be untrue. Further, his anxiety to discover the real sources of certain policies made it necessary for him to write an account of seemingly purposeless action in wilder or even barbarous regions such as Arcadia, Ambracia, Macedonia; in consequence his work embraces the whole of the Greek world, as he said it would in his famous preface.