§ 31. It is the authority of Thucydides which has imposed upon the learned an artificial chronology. The scholar is often wanting in acuteness. There are, I suppose, plenty of philologers who believe Thucydides far more implicitly than their Bible, and because he appears careful and trustworthy in contemporary affairs, actually assume that he must be equally credible in matters wholly beyond his ken. I suppose they imagine, though they do not state it, that the historian consulted State archives in Sicily, and set down his conclusions from a careful analysis of their evidence. We have no trace or mention of any such systematic archives; and if the historian indeed confined himself to these, what shall we say to his assertion that the Sikels passed from Italy to Sicily just three hundred years before the advent of the Greeks? How could he know this? But the solemn manner of the man and his habitual reticence concerning his authorities have wonderfully imposed upon the credulity of the learned. [Sidenote: Credulity in every sceptic.] Nobody rates Thucydides higher than I do, wherever he is really competent to give an unbiassed opinion. His accuracy is not, to my mind, impeached by the fact that he is found to have made a slovenly copy of a public document lately recovered on the Acropolis[67:1]. The variations, though many, are trifling, and do not affect the substance of the document. Yet this may do more to discredit him with the pedants than what seems to me dangerous credulity in larger questions. He is hardly to be blamed; no man escapes entirely from the prejudices of his age. The most sceptical in some points, as I have already noticed[67:2], let their credulity transpire in others. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, whose whole life was spent in framing sceptical arguments against early history, is found to accept the unity of authorship and unity of design of the Homeric poems. Grote, so careful and precise in accepting documents, subscribes to the genuineness of the Platonic _Letters_, which no other competent scholar admits; and so I suppose that in every sceptic, however advanced, some nook of belief will be found, often far less rational than the faith he has rejected. [Sidenote: Its probable occurrence in ancient critics.] [Sidenote: Value of Hippias' work.] [Sidenote: Even Eratosthenes counts _downward_.] [Sidenote: Clinton's warning.]