Great Leaders Historic Portraits From The Great Historians

The only work of note belonging to this field, which arose in the present epoch, was the history of the Social and Civil Wars by Lucius Cornelius Sisenna (praetor in 676). Those who had read it testify that it far excelled in liveliness and readableness the old dry chronicles, but was written withal in a style thoroughly impure and even degenerating into puerility; as indeed the few remaining fragments exhibit a paltry painting of horrible details[28], and a number of words newly coined or derived from the language of conversation. When it is added that the author's model and, so to speak, the only Greek historian familiar to him was Clitarchus, the author of a biography of Alexander the Great oscillating between history and fiction in the manner of the semi-romance which bears the name of Curtius, we shall not hesitate to recognize in Sisenna's celebrated historical work, not a product of genuine historical criticism and art, but the first Roman essay in that hybrid mixture of history and romance so much a favourite with the Greeks, which desires to make the groundwork of facts life-like and interesting by means of fictitious details and thereby makes it insipid and untrue; and it will no longer excite surprise that we meet with the same Sisenna also as translator of Greek fashionable romances[29] ...»