Excerpt from The Journal of Philology, Vol. 24These considerations must serve to excuse the following endeavours. Whatever may be the final verdict on Thucydides as an historian, as a writer he retains unimpaired after the lapse of twenty-two centuries his place in the ranks of litera ture. We may wish that we had better Mss authority for his text, but our means of improving it are after all not better than the mss themselves. Even corrections made on the evidence of public inscriptions may be inconclusive: for, besides assuming that the inscription is right, we have also to assume that Thucydides was never wrong. On questions of linguistic usage we often encounter the confident announce ments of modern experts. But the same critic, who in one place emends on the ground of the uniform practice of the author, in another place ingeniously accounts for the slight but intentional variation of his usage. To strike a fair balance of probabilities is in such matters not easy, and indecision must often commend itself to a sober judge.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.