Defining My Profession

Never mind that he was best known as a satirist (unless you want to credit satire as a display of insight), I think the Greek Lucian, who lived in the second century BC, had a pretty good idea of what a historian should be:

"The historian should be fearless and incorruptible,
a man of independence, loving frankness and truth;
one who, as the poet says, calls a fig a fig and a
spade spade. He should yield to neither hatred nor
affection, but should be unsparing and unpitying.
He should be neither shy nor deprecating,
but an impartial judge, giving each side all it deserves
but no more. He should know in his writings no
country and no city; he should bow to no authority
and acknowledge no king. He should never
consider what this or that man will think,
but should state the facts as they really occurred."