Note 73 — Chapter XXXVII · REPUBLIC — REMARKS ON THE PLATONIC COMMONWEALTH.

Plato, Legg. ii. p. 663 E.

This carelessness about historical matter of fact, as such — is not uncommon with ancient moralists and rhetoricians. Both of them were apt to treat history not as a series of true matters of fact, exemplifying the laws of human nature and society, and enlarging our knowledge of them for future inference — but as if it were a branch of fiction, to be handled so as to please our taste or improve our morality. Dionysius of Halikarnassus, blaming Thucydides for the choice of his subject, goes so far as to say “that the Peloponnesian war, a period of ruinous discord in Greece, ought to have been left in oblivion, and never to have passed into history” (Dion. Hal. ad Cn. Pomp. de Præc. Histor. Judic. p. 768 Reiske).

See a note at the beginning of chap. 38 of my “History of Greece”.