We pass now to the famous section w

We pass now to the famous section which follows on the method and purpose of the work. Just before it, Thucydides restates his belief in the supreme magnitude of the present war and his confidence in the essential picture which he has given of early Greece. This affirmation prompts him to glance, with amusing and quite characteristic irony, at those who easily accept all tradition, even such local and verifiable tradition as that Harmodius and Aristogeiton killed Hippias rather than Hipparchus, or who believe "the poets' gilding songs or what the logographers have written less for the sake of truth than to lend charm to their recitations." This last remark evidently applies to Herodotus, two of whose statements had just been singled out for criticism. "While a war is going on," Thucydides adds, "people always think it the greatest ever to have been fought, but, when it is over, they go back to admiring the past." The scholiast on the digression on the conspiracy of Cylon later in the first book somewhat mysteriously observes, "here the lion laughed," and the remark comes to mind at this and a few other passages where Thucydides finds a dry amusement, not unmixed with annoyance, in the follies of mankind. But whether his strictures of his contemporaries are wholly just may be doubted. At least, Pericles too is made to speak, no doubt authentically, of the supreme brilliance of the present as compared with the past, and even Thucydides' careful methods were by no means alien to the spirit of the time.