Plutarch
forces the morality of his personages to the fore; Diogenes gives
details of both the good and the bad in his. Plutarch is solid and
systematic; Diogenes is lighter and lacks system. I prefer Diogenes
Laertius to Plutarch, and if I were especially interested in any of the
illustrious ancients of whom they write, I should vastly prefer the
letters of the men themselves, if any existed, or otherwise the gossip
of their tentmakers or washerwomen, to any lives written of them by
either Diogenes Laertius or Plutarch.
THE ROMAN HISTORIANS
When I turned to the composition of historical novels, I desired to
ascertain if the historical method had been reduced to a system. I read
Lucian's _Instructions for Writing History_, an essay with the same
title, or with a very similar one, by the Abbe Mably, some essays by
Simmel, besides a book by a German professor, Ernst Bernheim,
_Lehrbuch der historischen Methode_.
I next read and re-read the Roman historians Julius Caesar, Tacitus,
Sallust and Suetonius.
_Sallust_
All these Roman historians no doubt were worthy gentlemen, but they
create an atmosphere of suspicion. When reading them, you suspect that
they are not always telling the whole truth. I read Sallust and feel
that he is lying; he has composed his narrative like a novel.
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