From helmadik@midway.uchicago.edu Sun Oct 28 11:15:44 2001 Received: from mailscan1.cac.washington.edu (mailscan1.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.16]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.6+UW01.08/8.11.6+UW01.08) with SMTP id f9SJFhN104994 for ; Sun, 28 Oct 2001 11:15:43 -0800 Received: FROM mxu4.u.washington.edu BY mailscan1.cac.washington.edu ; Sun Oct 28 11:15:43 2001 -0800 Received: from midway.uchicago.edu (midway.uchicago.edu [128.135.12.12]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.11.6+UW01.08/8.11.6+UW01.08) with ESMTP id f9SJFgQ25413 for ; Sun, 28 Oct 2001 11:15:42 -0800 Received: from [128.135.57.40] (h-dik.uchicago.edu [128.135.57.40]) by midway.uchicago.edu (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id f9SJFfF22243 for ; Sun, 28 Oct 2001 13:15:41 -0600 (CST) Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: helmadik@nsit-popmail.uchicago.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <8C1D549B4324D51181010090277A49DE163826@EXCHANGE> References: <8C1D549B4324D51181010090277A49DE163826@EXCHANGE> Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 13:14:35 -0600 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: Helma Dik Subject: RE: Quote Source (Pseudo-Herodotus) Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" RE: Quote Source (Pseudo-Herodotus)
Of course, it also sounds very much like Aristotle in the Poetics (1451a-b; quoted in the English translation on Perseus):

 What we have said already makes it further clear that a poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse--indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history, whether written in
 metre or not. The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.

the text can be found at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Aristot.+Poet.+1451a


This is Mark Twain pretending to quote Herodotus.  T. R. Glover uses it in his Sather lectures on Herodotus.
The actual quote is more like:  "Most things do not happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all;
the conscientious historian will rectify this deficiency" (but I am quoting from memory and may have it slightly
garbled).
 
George Pesely
Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, Tennessee


Christesen's quote


"not everything that could have happened did, and not everything that happened did so at the right time."

--
Helma Dik
Dept. of Classics
University of Chicago
helmadik@midway.uchicago.edu
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/classics/
.