Book II - Wilbourhall.org

Ixii INTRODUCTION. [iii.ment from this historian's prose will certainly be disappointed.They will come across laboured antithesesand ungraceful inversions. They will find thatin the elaboration of the diction the syntactical formof the sentence occasionally suffers. These thingsare really much less common than many critics wouldlead us to suppose. Too frequently the three-fifths ofpure narrative are entirely left out of account inestimating the style of Thucydides, and the two-fifthsof speeches and dissertations treated as though theyformed the Avhole work. The old notion that anythingwill do in Thucydides because Dionysius foundhis language sometimes harsh, and Cicero found hismeaning sometimes obscure, is only gradually disappearing.But indeed, anyone who reads inDionysius the passages quoted by him, and who alsolooks into the manuscripts, knows how much thecopyists have done towards earning for Thucydidesthe reputation of being unable to write grammatically.In reality the violations of grammatical rules areslight, and can all be explained on the principle thatthe author's excessive brevity forced him to givegreater importance to the sense than to the form.Thus, for instance, the subject of the verb is changedwith greater rapidity than we are accustomed to, orat least enlarged or contracted at will : a genitiveabsolute is sometimes inserted when the participleought in strict grammar to agree with a word inanother case : the construction is sometimes changedto suit the writer's convenience. But we might assoon suppose that Thucydides started to write asentence without knowing how he would end it as