History must not be written as panegyric. History must not be written as poetry. Among the faults of contemporary historians are lack of taste, over-abundance of details, purple patches, inaccuracies about facts.
“There are some ... who leave alone, or deal very cursorily with, all that is great and memorable; amateurs and not artists, they have no selective faculty, and loiter over copious laboured descriptions of the various trifles; it is as if a visitor to Olympia, instead of examining, commending or describing to his stay-at-home friends the general greatness and beauty of the Zeus, were to be struck with the exact symmetry and polish of its footstool, or the proportions of its shoe, and give all his attention to these minor points.”[316]
Indispensable qualities of the ideal historian are political insight and ability in writing. His “one task is to tell the thing as it happened.”[317] He will be “fearless, incorruptible, independent, a believer in frankness and veracity; one that will call a spade a spade, make no concession to likes and dislikes, nor spare any men for pity or respect or propriety; an impartial judge, kind to all, but too kind to none; a literary cosmopolite with neither suzerain nor king, never heeding what this or that man may think, but setting down the thing that befell.”[317] Thucydides fulfills this ideal.
In diction and style, the marks of the true historian are frankness and truth, lucidity and simplicity. The preface should be in proportion to the subject. “The body of the history ... is nothing from beginning to end but a long narrative; it must therefore be graced with the narrative virtues—smooth, level, and consistent progress, neither soaring nor crawling, and the charm of lucidity.” “Brevity is always desirable.” “Restraint in descriptions of mountains, walls, rivers, and the like, is very important.” If a speech is introduced, “the first requirement is that it should suit the character both of the speaker and of the occasion.” “It may occasionally happen that some extraordinary story has to be introduced; it should be simply narrated, without guarantee of its truth, thrown down for any-one to make what he can of it.” The historian should write not for the present, but for eternity. He should hope to have said of himself: “This was a man indeed, free and free-spoken; flattery and servility were not in him; he was truth all through.”[318]
Gildersleeve was probably right in calling the True History “a comic sequel to a brilliant essay entitled ‘How to write History.’”[319] The traditional manuscript order which places the True History after How History Should Be Written seems so aptly prompted by Lucianic irony. For this romance in two books is not history at all and has nothing of Lucian’s primary requirement for history, that it should be true! It is a work of pure imagination, one of the earliest accounts of fictitious voyages and as such is part of the great tradition from the Odyssey to Gulliver’s Travels.[320] Lucian’s preface explains both the nature of the piece and his reasons for writing it.[321]
The True History like many good stories is told in the first person by Lucian himself. The author, moreover, preludes and interrupts the narrative to get in direct touch with his reader. In his introduction, he states that his purpose in writing is to furnish to students some reading that will give relaxation, but at the same time “a little food for thought.” The story is bound to charm, Lucian thinks, because of the novelty of the subject, the humor of the plan, the plausible lying involved and the comical parodies of such authors as Ctesias, Iambulus, and Homer in his Odyssey. Lucian confesses to being a liar with the best of them, but affirms that his lying is unique in being honest because he admits it.
“Be it understood, then, that I am writing about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others—which, in fact, do not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist. Therefore my readers should on no account believe in them.”[322]
In spite of this confession, Lucian here and there in his story tries to create an atmosphere of veracity by protestations of it. As he never saw the Corn Sparrow forces or the Crane Knights, he does not venture to relate the marvellous and incredible stories told about them.[323] When he describes the magic mirror over a well in the Moon which furnished him television of his family and country he says that disbelievers by going there will find he tells the truth.[324] In the Island of the Wicked, Lucian finds all liars, both those who had told lies on earth or written them, among the latter Ctesias and Herodotus. “On seeing them,” he says, “I had good hopes for the future, for I have never told a lie that I know of.”[325] The last sentence of the romance is: “What happened in the other world I shall tell you in the succeeding books.”[326] This, a Greek scholiast comments, is the greatest lie of all!
Now after having seen what a wag Lucian is from his own words, we must decide how we are going to take him. Are we to seek in him relaxation and entertainment (the gift of all true romance) or are we going to marshal our “little learning” to meet his and study all his sources, his parodies of historians and philosophers, or search for allegories in his fantastic worlds? The happy way will be along the path of the golden mean. Gildersleeve put up a sign-board to it and inscribed directions for future travellers.
“To enjoy the show properly, it is far better for the reader to give himself up to this play of Lucian’s fancy than to endeavor to unriddle whatever satire of contemporary literature may lie concealed in its allegory.... There may be profound meaning in the war which breaks out between the Sunburghers under Phaêthon, and the Moonburghers under Endymion, which begins with the attempt of the Moonburghers to found a colony on the desert planet of Lucifer, and which ends with the victory of the Sunburghers, Lucifer being declared common property and the vanquished compelled to pay an annual tribute of ten thousand amphoreis of dew. But so elastic are all such allegories that they can be stretched to fit anything, and the war of these Heliotes and Selenites would answer to describe the conflict between orthodoxy and rationalism, and Lucifer would stand for the coming man. But how much better to look with childish interest on the marshalling of Horsevultures and Chickpeashooters and Garlickfighters and Flea-archers and Wind-runners, and to watch the huge spiders spin their web from the moon to Lucifer.”[327]