We have mentioned it several times, the history has not to be judged, criticized either, it has not to exalt exploits and politics, men and arms. Marc Bloch, among the others, already taught it at the beginnings of the twentieth-century. Yet even earlier, around the year 166, a Syrian called Luciano from Samosata wrote it in his “How history has to be written”, a libel in which the protagonist was the “objective history”, just not a party history.
Luciano, in a letter to his friend Filone – of whom we know so little -, begins saying that lately there was a proliferating of new historians that had not the faintest idea how certain facts happened, or that even they didn’t know how they moved on the battleground, or historians that adulated some characters or others, hiding the truth of the events and changing them as they liked. He says:
“[…] the most part of the historians, neglecting to tell the events, they dwell in praises of the heads or the general, they exalt some of them and discourage excessively the hostile ones [...] praising and doing happy anyway who is object of praise, and that would not have any problems on getting this goal turning to the lie.”
But not only this, he affirms to have heard someone describing events that still had to happen, future events, almost prophesying. He mentions details that he had read and listened, of never happened enterprises, of historians that dwelt describing a soldier’s armour or a geographical place, of men dying in extraordinary way, in short of that history that is not real history.
And Luciano from Samosata has very clear ideas when he went into the theme, and regarding this he notes:
“Only one is the historian’s task: reporting the facts as well as they have been fulfilled […]”
He – referring to the historian – is only the teller, he who is frank, fearless, incorruptible, free and friend of frankness and truth:
“[…] one that, not on the basis of the hate or friendship, sides with someone, respects or feels compassion, shame and fear; right judge, benevolent with everybody but not enough to assign to one of the two parts more than what is due, foreigner in his books and not attached to a town, not subject to laws or to a sovereign either; one who doesn’t keep in mind what it will seems to others, but he tells what has been done.”
For the divulgation such comprehensible terms should be used so that people understood and the educated men appreciated, avoiding speaking as if one addressed to beginners, with a lexicon “clear and sober, such to show the subject in the most marked way.”
The spontaneous question could be: where do you get the news from? Luciano affirms that the best thing would be to be present and observe with his own eyes, but if this is not possible, to address as far as possible to impartial and serious people, people that don’t add and takes something to what already happened. He had always appreciated, in their limits, Tucidide, Erodoto and Senofonte’s works, a triad that he always kept in view.
If then a listener can perceive what it deals with, then:
“[…] the work has got to perfection and it has received the praise that is due to a Phidias of the history.”
*****
Italian version here.
[...] - How history has to be written, Luciano from Samosata. [...]