After your article I have re-read Dion and Plutarch.  It is indeed singular that for twenty centuries men have read and reread those pages without any one’s realising how confused and absurd their accounts are.

It seems to be a law of human psychology that almost all historic personages, from Minos to Mazzini, from Judas to Charlotte Corday, from Xerxes to Napoleon, are imaginary personages; some transfigured into demigods, by admiration and success; the others debased by hate and failure.  In reality, the former were often uglier, the latter more attractive than tradition has pictured them, because men in general are neither too good nor too bad, neither too intelligent nor too stupid.  In conclusion, historic tradition is full of deformed caricatures and ideal transfigurations; because, when they are dead, the impression of their political contemporaries still serves the ends of parties, states, nations, institutions.  Can this man exalt in a people the consciousness of its own power, of its own energy, of its own value?  Lo, then they make a god of him, as of Napoleon or Bismarck.  Can this other serve to feed in the mass, odium and scorn of another party, of a government, of an order of things that it is desirable to injure?  Then they make a monster of him, as happened in Rome to Tiberius, in France to Napoleon III, in Italy to all who for one motive or another opposed the unification of Italy.

It is true that after a time the interests that have coloured certain figures with certain hues and shades disappear; but then the reputation, good or bad, of a personage is already made; his name is stamped on the memory of posterity with an adjective,—­the great, the wise, the wicked, the cruel, the rapacious,—­and there is no human force that can dissever name from adjective.  Some far-away historian, studying all the documents, examining the sequence of events, will confute the tradition in learned books; but his work not only will not succeed in persuading the ignorant multitude, but must also contend against the multiplied objections offered by the instinctive incredulity of people of culture.

You will say to me, “What is the use of writing history?  Why spend so much effort to correct the errors in which people will persist just as if the histories were never written?” I reply that I do not believe that the office of history is to give to men who have guided the great human events a posthumous justice.  It is already work serious enough for every generation to give a little justice to the living, rather than occupy itself rendering it to the dead, who indeed, in contradistinction from the living, have no need of it.  The study of history, the rectification of stories of the past, ought to serve another and practical end; that is, train the men who govern nations to discern more clearly than may be possible from their own environment the truth underlying the legends.  As I have already said, passions, interests, present historic personages in a thousand forms when they are alive, transfiguring not only the persons themselves, but events the most diverse, the character of institutions, the conditions of nations.