There is something else closely connected with this: namely, that Thomas in his lifelong labors of interpreting Aristotle was ultimately not concerned with the historical author named Aristotle, nor with an accurate reconstruc­tion of his doctrine. This last statement must at once be clarified, lest it be misunderstood. It is true that Thomas endeavored, in a manner highly unusual for the thirteenth century, to discover Aristotle’s real meaning. His commen­taries on Aristotle remain to this day among the few con­genial commentaries which truly cast light upon Aristotle’s doctrines-this in spite of the mediocre translations upon which Thomas had to rely, and although he himself scarcely knew Greek, and although, in the case of the Meta­physics, he had no inkling that the book was not planned as a unit and cast in one mold, as it were, but was a mis­cellaneous collection of very different pieces. Nevertheless, the ultimate intent of St. Thomas’ interpretation of Aristotle aimed at something beyond Aristotle. “He sticks to his text, it is true, and he wants to understand it-but not as a scholar who indulges in the historical reproduction of a system belonging to the past; rather, as a seeker, who wishes to find in it a witness for the truth.”

Parmênides relata sua chegada à porta dos “caminhos da noite e do dia”.
Cubells, o filólogo-vidente, comenta:

«Puede tratarse de una puerta levadiza. Ello no está necesariamente en contradicción con los vv. 20-21, pues los ejes de que allí se habla pueden tener posición horizontal y en tal caso el moví­miento de la puerta al abrirse sería en sentido vertical. Con todo, la forma dual empleada en el v. 20 (arerote) indica que se trata de dos ejes y por tanto de dos batientes. La puerta que esta descripción sugiere tiene ejes verticales, aunque repitámoslo, no por necesidad. Es posible, como sugiere Untersteiner, que se trate de dos puertas distintas. Una puerta corriente, con batientes que se abren hacía los lados, y otra especie de puerta levadiza situada sobre la anterior. La elevación de la puerta supe­rior -que no es necesaria para entrar en la morada de la diosa, con la inferior bastaba- sería un signo de la solemnidad con que es recibido el poeta.»

Cubells, Fernando, Los filósofos presocráticos.

Unfortunately, the two longest ancient accounts of Roman Republican history, the area in which the problems are currently the most acute and the most widely discussed, the histories of Livy and of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, were composed about 500 years (in very round numbers) later than the traditional date for the founding of the Republic, 200 years from the defeat of Hannibal. Try as we may, we cannot trace any of their written sources back beyond about 300 B c, and mostly not further than to the age of Marius and Sulla. Yet the early centuries of the Republic and the still earlier centuries that preceded it are narrated in detail in Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Where did they find their information? No matter how many older statements we can either document or posit – irrespective of possible reliability – we eventually reach a void. But ancient writers, like historians ever since, could not tolerate a void, and they filled it in one way or another, ultimately by pure invention.

(The Ancient History, Sir M. Finley)

Yet the passion for numbers in ancient history, strongest in demographic and economic history but increasingly common in other branches as well, has increased since Boeckh’s day. One understands the psychology. Numbers give an appearance of ‘objectivity’, of ’science’, which is in fact not warranted without a great deal of justification in each instance, and they make the historian’s account more vivid, more ‘real’ to the reader. ‘Twelve’ seems to tell much more than ‘very rarely’, though as an isolated number it may be wrong and is anyway less meaningful. So deep-grained is this psychology, coupled with the ancient historian’s feeling of inferiority towards his fortunate colleagues in modern or even medieval history (Jones’s ‘ignominious truth’), that many are unable to resist weaving a ‘frail tissue of tenuous conjectures’. Jones himself was a confirmed non-resister.

I give one example: in a short general article on ancient slavery he calculated that a slave in the Roman empire in the second century A D ‘cost eight to ten times his annual keep as against a year or a year and a quarter’s annual keep’ in fourth-century B c Athens. 31 shall not repeat the fantastic arithmetic by which the price for a ‘normal slave’ and the cost to his owner of his maintenance were arrived at, by manipulating a handful of miscellaneous literary references from heterogeneous contexts, most of which were obviously meant to be humorous or absurd, such as the short satirical poem by Martial (6.65) about an auction of a prostitute during which the auctioneer kissed the lady several times ‘in order to demonstrate her purity’, whereupon the man who bid 6oo sesterces withdrew his bid. I cite this particular effort not because I propose to spend time demonstrating the pointlessness of such arithmetic, but for two other reasons: the first is to note the widespread prior fallacy, that any two comparisons are ipso facto meaningful, in this case between one Greek city in the fourth century B c and the whole of the Roman Empire as a single unity five hundred years later; secondly, because of the magnetism of such calculations (strengthened by a touch of caution: ‘eight to ten times’), among specialists who commonly repeat the conclusions without checking what lies behind them, and among non-specialists who accept them on the auctoritas of the original author.

(The Ancient History, Sir M. Finley)