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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: the most celebrated speeches in Tacitus (that in which the Emperor
Claudius gives the Gauls their freedom) is shown, by an inscription
discovered recently at Lugdunum, to be entirely fabulous.
Upon the other hand, it must be borne in mind that these speeches
were not intended to deceive; they were regarded merely as a
certain dramatic element which it was allowable to introduce into
history for the purpose of giving more life and reality to the
narration, and were to be criticised, not as we should, by arguing
how in an age before shorthand was known such a report was possible
or how, in the failure of written documents, tradition could bring
down such an accurate verbal account, but by the higher test of
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