And no accumulation of footnotes can prove that a historian has really captured the truth. Footnotes indicate some of the ways in which their author has analyzed the sources and drawn inferences from them. But as a device never intended to do more than shore up one version of a contentious event or interpretation, they cannot possibly support an entire book, detail by detail. Nonetheless, footnotes are vital to modern scholarship. They are vital, first of all, because they give us reason to believe that their authors have done their best to find out the truth about past events and distant countries.
Footnotes have a second, even more important role, as well.
They give the concerned reader purchase, leverage, an Archimedean point from which to shift and crack the apparently marmoreal certainties of the text they supposedly support. Ancient historians wrote to give pragmatic and moral instruction, couched in the form of examples that would hit home more forcefully than general precepts. Their texts admitted questions about politics and morality.