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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: later Greek statues that refined effeminacy, that overstrained
gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere of history. The
rules laid down for historical composition are those relating to
the aesthetic value of digressions, the legality of employing more
than one metaphor in the same sentence, and the like; and
historians are ranked not by their power of estimating evidence but
by the goodness of the Greek they write.
I must note also the important influence on literature exercised by
Alexander the Great; for while his travels encouraged the more
accurate research of geography, the very splendour of his
achievements seems to have brought history again into the sphere of
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