This unity that gradually ties even

This unity that gradually ties events together is never directly expressed; there is seemingly no interpretation added to the strict reporting of facts. It is the historian’s selectivity that creates the unity: the facts he relates are only those that bear witness to it. Thucydides starts with the disorder of raw facts, or more exactly—because it is difficult to involve such a dubious motion of objectivity—the disorder that might appear when the historian is confronted with a variety of linkages, all of them partial ones, revealing different points of view. One might say that he covers this disorder with a screen; this screen blocks out everything that he considers extraneous, so that the only visible elements are those that have an internal relationship to each other: at this point, like a message where all the letters that are not important are hidden, the whole becomes readable, acquires meaning.