This direct presentation, where the

This direct presentation, where the personality of the historian intrudes as little as possible, and the participants explain themselves and each other, is normal in Thucydides. It is, as any attentive reader senses, a highly dramatic method; it was this quality that Cornford so seriously exaggerated in judging Thucydides as a historian. For there is this basic paradox in Thucydides, that he is at once a scientific historian and yet, stylistically, a dramatist. Where Cornford erred was in extending the dramatic quality from presentation to conception; we fall into the reverse error if we attempt to introduce the scientific nature of the historian's view of history into his vocabulary of cause. The historian's explanations and analyses must be sought, not directly, but through his presentation of the minds and the emotions of the participants.