from Helena, chapter 6, Ancien Régime (Evelyn Waugh)

'It must be a sad time for your people,' said Helena.

'Also a very glorious time,'

'Really, Lactantius, what possible glory can there be in getting into the hands of the police?' said Minervina.  'I never heard such affectation.  If you feel like that I wonder you didn't stay at home in Nicomedia.  Plenty of glory there.'

'It needs a special quality to be a martyr - just as it needs a special quality to be a writer.  Mine is the humbler rôle, but one must not think it quite valueless.  One might combine two proverbs and say: "Art is long and will prevail."  You see it is equally possible to give the right form to the wrong thing, and the wrong form to the right thing.  Suppose that in years to come, when the Church's troubles seem to be over, there should come an apostate of my own trade, a false historian, with the mind of Cicero or Tacitus and the soul of an animal,' and he nodded towards the gibbon who fretted his golden chain and chattered for fruit.  'A man like that might make it his business to write down the martyrs and excuse the persecutors.  He might be refuted again and again but what he wrote would remain in people's minds when the refutations were quite forgotten.  That is what style does - it has the Egyptian secret of the embalmers.  It is not to be despised.'

'Lactantius, dear, don't be so serious.  No one despises you.  We were only joking.  I should certainly never permit you to return East.  You're a great pet and everyone here is very fond of you.'

'Your majesty is too kind.'

Noble, from Exercises in Style (Raymond Queneau, trans. Barbara Wright)

At the hour when the rosy fingers of the dawn start to crack, I climbed, rapid as a tongue of flame, onto a bus - mighty of stature and with cowlike eyes - of the S line of a sinuous course.  I noticed, with the precision and acuity of a Red Indian on the warpath, the presence of a young man whose neck was longer than that of the swift-footed giraffe, and whose soft hat was adorned with a plait like the hero of an exercise in style.  Baleful Discord with breasts of soot came with her mouth reeking of a nothingness of toothpaste.  Discord, I say, came to breathe her malignant virus between this young man with the giraffe-like neck and the plait round his hat, and a passenger of irresolute and milk-white mien.  The former addressed himself to the latter in these terms: 'I say, you wicked man, anyone might think you were treading on my toes on purpose!'  Having said these words, the young man with the giraffe-like neck and the plait round his hat quickly went and sat down.

Later, in the Cour de Rome of majestic proportions, I again caught sight of the young man with the giraffe-like neck and the plait round his hat, accompanied by a friend, an arbiter elegantiarum, who was uttering these words of censure which I could hear with my agile ear - censure which was directed to the most exterior garment of the young man with the giraffe-like neck and the plait round his hat: 'You ought to diminish its opening by the addition or elevation of a button to or on its circular periphery.'

from Bluff Your Way in the Classics (Ross Leckie)

Thucydides (460-400 BC)

By means of making up speeches in his History for the people who made up the war in which they say what he thought they thought they did or ought to, might have, could have done, thereby explaining, commenting, elucidating and rationalising in accord with a History written not for the applause of the moment but for all time and resting on what he himself saw and on the reports of others, after careful research aiming at the greatest possible accuracy in each case, he wrote a history of and, to a large extent, created the Peloponnesian War.