Greek historians were never afraid to use their own judgement. They were willing to say 'I don't know', to speculate about the motives of the people they described, and to qualify their opinions on occasion by 'perhaps' and 'probably'. It is the appearance of words like 'perhaps' which marks the beginning of true historical writing.S.C. Woodhouse, English-Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1910), p. 606: ἴσως and τάχα seem to occur more often in Thucydides than in Herodotus.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, September 22, 2022
Perhaps
Kenneth Dover, The Greeks, 3rd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), p. 124:
