We are acquainted with their actions, their speeches, their writings; we have abundance of letters and well-authenticated anecdotes relating to them: yet what candid man will venture very positively to say which of them were honest and which of them were dishonest men?
It appears easier to pronounce decidedly upon the great characters of antiquity, not because we have greater means of discovering truth, but simply because we have less means of detecting error.

The modern historians of Greece have forgotten this.
Their heroes and villains are as consistent in all their sayings and doings as the cardinal virtues and the deadly sins in an allegory.

We should as soon expect a good action from giant Slay-good in Bunyan as from Dionysius; and a crime of Epaminondas would seem as incongruous as a faux-pas of the grave and comely damsel called Discretion, who answered the bell at the door of the house Beautiful.
This error was partly the cause and partly the effect of the high estimation in which the later ancient writers have been held by modern scholars.

Those French and English authors who have treated of the affairs of Greece have generally turned with contempt from the simple and natural narrations of Thucydides and Xenophon to the extravagant representations of Plutarch, Diodorus, Curtius, and other romancers of the same class,--men who described military operations without ever having handled a sword, and applied to the seditions of little republics speculations formed by observation on an empire which covered half the known world.

Of liberty they knew nothing.