History is a science, no more and no less.
The ideal of progress, freedom of thought, and the decline of ecclesiastical power go together.
I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.
A complete assemblage of the smallest facts of human history will tell in the end.
The Macedonian people and their kings were of Greek stock, as their traditions and the scanty remains of their language combine to testify.
