Give me a scholar, therefore, who is able to think and to write, to look with an eye of discernment into things, and to do business himself, if called upon, who hath both civil and military knowledge; one, moreover, who has been in camps, and has seen armies in the field and out of it; knows the use of arms, and machines, and warlike engines of every kind; can tell what the front, and what the horn is, how the ranks are to be disposed, how the horse is to be directed, and from whence to advance or to retreat; one, in short, who does not stay at home and trust to the reports of others: but, above all, let him be of a noble and liberal mind; let him neither fear nor hope for anything; otherwise he will only resemble those unjust judges who determine from partiality or prejudice, and give sentence for hire: but, whatever the man is, as such let him be described. The historian must not care for Philip, when he loses his eye by the arrow of Aster, {53a} at Olynthus, nor for Alexander, when he so cruelly killed Clytus at the banquet: Cleon must not terrify him, powerful as he was in the senate, and supreme at the tribunal, nor prevent his recording him as a furious and pernicious man; the whole city of Athens must not stop his relation of the Sicilian slaughter, the seizure of Demosthenes, {53b} the death of Nicias, their violent thirst, the water which they drank, and the death of so many of them whilst they were drinking it. He will imagine (which will certainly be the case) that no man in his senses will blame him for recording things exactly as they fell out. However some may have miscarried by imprudence, or others by ill fortune, he is only the relator, not the author of them. If they are beaten in a sea-fight, it is not he who sinks them; if they fly, it is not he who pursues them; all he can do is to wish well to, and offer up his vows for them; but by passing over or contradicting facts, he cannot alter or amend them. It would have been very easy indeed for Thucydides, with a stroke of his pen, to have thrown down the walls of Epipolis, sunk the vessel of Hermocrates, or made an end of the execrable Gylippus, who stopped up all the avenues with his walls and ditches; to have thrown the Syracusans on the Lautumiae, and have let the Athenians go round Sicily and Italy, according to the early hopes of Alcibiades: but what is past and done Clotho cannot weave again, nor Atropos recall.