[{58}] Both Thucydides and Livy are reprehensible in this particular; and the same objection may be made to Thuanus, Clarendon, Burnet, and many other modern historians.
[{59}] How just is this observation of Lucian’s, and at the same time how truly poetical is the image which he makes use of to express it! It puts us in mind of his rival critic Longinus, who, as Pope has observed, is himself the great sublime he draws.
[{60}] By this very just observation, Lucian means to censure all those writers—and we have many such now amongst us—who take so much pains to smooth and round their periods, as to disgust their readers by the frequent repetition of it, as it naturally produces a tiresome sameness in the sound of them; and at the same time discovers too much that laborious art and care, which it is always the author’s business as much as possible to conceal.
[{61}] See Homer’s “Iliad,” bk. xiii., 1. 4.
[{62a}] The famous Lacedæmonian general. The circumstance alluded to is in Thucydides, bk. iv.
[{62b}] Gr. ομοχρονειτω, a technical term, borrowed from music, and signifying that tone of the voice which exactly corresponds with the instrument accompanying it.
[{66a}] A coarse fish that came from Pontus, or the Black Sea.—Saperdas advehe Ponto. See Pers. Sat. v. 1. 134.
[{66b}] Here doctors differ. Several of Thucydides’s descriptions are certainly very long, many of them, perhaps, rather tedious.
[{67}] Lucian is rather severe on this writer. Cicero only says, De omnibus omnia libere palam dixit; he spoke freely of everybody. Other writers, however, are of the same opinion with our satirist with regard to him. See Dions. Plutarch. Cornelius Nepos, etc.
[{69}] Alluding to the story of Diogenes, as related in the beginning.