Wayfaring through the labyrinth (interwebz), I stumbled across a New York Times Book Review by Brodsky regarding the poet C. P. Cavafy. (Often, my reading discoveries begin mildly enough: I start by reading a poem from my library, in this case "Ithaca" by C. P. Cavafy, which led me to an essay by Gore Vidal on Cavafy which prompted me to pick up Conversations with Joseph Brodsky -knew Cavafy to be a favored poet of Brodsky's- which forced me to the interwebz to see what else had been said):
One of the main characteristics of historical writing—and especially of classical history—is, inevitably, stylistic ambiguity resulting either in an abundance of contradictory evidence or in firm contradictory evaluations of that evidence. Herodotus and Thucydides themselves sometimes sound like latterday paradoxicalists. In other words, ambiguity is an inevitable by-product of the struggle for objectivity in which, since the Romantics, every more or less serious poet has been involved.