He begins poring over contemporary accounts of naval warfare, and finds that the battles in which he was engaged are described in a completely different way to what actually happened. He is so disturbed by this that he gravely doubts whether any true historical account is possible and in disgust casts his manuscript onto the fire. This anecdote, so cherished by Goethe, is most instructive, for it demonstrates what we know from psychology: that truth, like the artichoke, has many layers and more often than not behind each truth another lies hidden. There is no definitive chronicle that will account for the soul’s actualities, no absolute truth protocol for the historical—and here I return to my theme—for it must always, at least to some extent, be something imagined. The purely material assemblage of facts brings only contradictions; a certain synthetic lens has always been necessary and always will be. The sculptural work always comes from the human; never can the cold specialist gain access to this life force, this quickening of truth, if he does not possess an atom of the poet in him, the seer, the visionary. This is why we can say that in all the areas where history appears uninteresting, it is more the fault of the historian than history itself, for it has not been communicated in a sufficiently poetic way. If we observe history with eyes wide open, as the poet does, we will find that there are no uninteresting figures. No one, even the smallest, most anonymous, most modest character, once the truthful poet’s gaze has rested upon him, is dull or indifferent to other men and there are no dull or dead periods of the past either, only poor historians. And, to explain more forcefully, I would say: there is perhaps no actual history in itself, in a general sense, but it is only through the art of writing, the vision of the narrator, when the very factual date of history is willed; for every experience and incident only becomes genuine in terms of the senses, when it is recounted in a truthful and verisimilar way. There are in fact no great or small events, only ones that remain alive or are dead, which are remodelled or are past.

Here is an example. Around 3,000 years ago, numberless peoples were dispersed around the Mediterranean and yet we are only properly informed of two: the Greek and the Jewish cultures. The rest have vanished. Why do we only know about these two peoples? Were they somehow greater and more important than all the others? Did more events happen to them than their neighbours? Not at all. Solon the wise was mayor of a small town, barely more significant than a village of today, and the battles between Sparta and Rome, between the Jews and the Amalekites were little more than tussles between parishes. Yet all this has preserved a grandiose and vivid portrait in our memory; it belongs to our deepest sense of history, and the Battle of Marathon, that of Salamis, the conquest of Thermopylae and the taking of Jericho form part of our intellectual knowledge. Each of us has an image of these events engraved on his soul. Why? Not because they were important facts in geographic or numerical terms, but because the Bible on the one hand and the Greeks on the other knew how to recount them in an incomparably splendid and imaginative way, for the poetic expectation had been wholly fulfilled. We see here, and a thousand times more: great actions, great exploits are never enough on their own; a double action is always necessary—the great fact and the great narrator, the exciting figure and the imaginative performer. Achilles was nothing more than a simple, bold, strong swashbuckler, a hundred of whom can be found in every town and thousands more in every people, from the Papuans to the Iroquois; but only this Achilles became the global hero because Homer saw him as great and presented him thus: the poet transformed him into a legendary mythical character. Consequently, the only way to preserve such events is to re-form them into poetic history. It alone, like the secret of embalming practised by the Egyptians, preserves the colourful over millennia. All the caliphs and princes of antiquity and the Middle Ages knew that any action could not remain alive without a skilful storyteller; that’s why they had all their bards, their troubadours and chroniclers. Caesar, Napoleon and Bismarck lost no time in writing the facts of their lives themselves in order that their future legend would accord with their own taste; and our statesmen and diplomats of today know this equally well, which is why they maintain such a healthy rapport with journalists and willingly grant them interviews. These last know that all that happens in the world has no chance of existing for posterity unless the account is forged with the legendary in mind, even at the expense of truth. For men and entire peoples have a craving for legends; I would even dare to say that one key element for a great man is that he creates around himself a poetic aura, an atmosphere of legend, where again and again posterity attempts to reconstitute poetically his character or explain it psychologically. Certain figures such as Napoleon, Gustav Adolf and Caesar will always attract new dramatic and epic poets. Their psychological impetus appears undiminished even after many centuries; it just continues, like a tree which always gives out new leaves at the appropriate time.

But what is true of individuals is also true of nations, for are they not simply collective individuals? A nation gains more power in the spiritual space, the more poetically it can present its historical existence and development in the world. It is not enough that a people might have achieved great things in the domain of culture or war—that is only half of it. The Skipetares of the Balkans, warring for centuries and in a permanent state of insurrection, thereby take a leading role in the history of our world culture, for they knew how best to present the poetic element in their own deeds, raising the life of their people to the level of a saga, a graphic myth.