Representative, not verbatim

Sperber and Wilson point out that ‘direct quotations are the most obvious examples of utterances used to represent not what they describe but what they resemble." This needs to be constantly borne in mind, since the expectation of exact resemblance is a modern notion. Even when direct speech is marked as such by textual punctuation, expectations of faithful representation are a modern phenomenon. The lengthy speeches found in the works of Thucydides, Xenophon and others are most unlikely to have been represented in the exact form in which they were spoken, although Polybius, criticising other historians, claims that he was reporting what was actually said.—Margaret Sim, A Relevant Way to Read, 30