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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: on this point Polybius seems to be far in advance of the opinions
held by literary men on the subject not merely in his own day, but
for centuries after.
Herodotus had introduced speeches avowedly dramatic and fictitious.
Thucydides states clearly that, where he was unable to find out
what people really said, he put down what they ought to have said.
Sallust alludes, it is true, to the fact of the speech he puts into
the mouth of the tribune Memmius being essentially genuine, but the
speeches given in the senate on the occasion of the Catilinarian
conspiracy are very different from the same orations as they appear
in Cicero. Livy makes his ancient Romans wrangle and chop logic
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