Thucydides
Greek historian
born 460 bc or earlier?
died after 404 bc?
Main
greatest of ancient Greek historians and
author of the History of the Peloponnesian
War, which recounts the struggle between
Athens and Sparta in the 5th century bc. His
work was the first recorded political and
moral analysis of a nation’s war policies.
Life
All that is certainly known (perhaps all
that ancient scholars knew) of Thucydides’
life is what he reveals about himself in the
course of his narrative. He was an Athenian,
old enough when the war began to estimate
its importance and judge that it was likely
to be a long one and to write an account of
it, observing and making notes from its
beginning. He was probably born, therefore,
not later than 460—perhaps a few years
earlier since his detailed narrative begins,
just before 431, with the events which
provoked the war. He was certainly older
than 30 when he was elected stratēgos, a
military magistrate of great importance, in
424. Hence, he belongs to the generation
younger than that of the Greek historian
Herodotus.
His father’s name was Olorus, which is
not known as an Athenian name; Olorus was
probably of Thracian descent on his mother’s
side. Thucydides was related in some way to
the great Athenian statesman and general
Miltiades, who had married the daughter of a
Thracian prince of this name. He himself had
property in Thrace, including mining rights
in the gold mines opposite the island of
Thasos, and was, he tells us, a man of
influence there.
He was in Athens when the great
pestilence of 430–429 raged; he caught the
disease himself and saw others suffer.
Later, in 424, he was elected one of the 10
stratēgoi of the year and, because of his
connections, was given command of the fleet
in the Thraceward region, based at Thasos.
He failed to prevent the capture of the
important city of Amphipolis by the Spartan
general Brasidas, who launched a sudden
attack in the middle of winter. Because of
this blunder, Thucydides was recalled,
tried, and sentenced to exile. This, he says
later, gave him greater opportunity for
undistracted study for his History and for
travel and wider contacts, especially on the
Peloponnesian side—Sparta and its allies.
He lived through the war, and his exile
of 20 years ended only with the fall of
Athens and the peace of 404. The time and
manner of his death are uncertain, but that
he died shortly after 404 is probable, and
that he died by violence in the troubled
times following the peace may well be true,
for the History stops abruptly, long before
its appointed end. His tomb and a monument
to his memory were still to be seen in
Athens in the 2nd century ad.
Scope and plan of the History
The History, which is divided into eight
books, probably not by Thucydides’ design,
stops in the middle of the events of the
autumn of 411 bc, more than six and a half
years before the end of the war. This much
at least is known: that three historians,
Cratippus (a younger contemporary), Xenophon
(who lived a generation later), and
Theopompus (who lived in the last third of
the 4th century), all began their histories
of Greece where Thucydides left off.
Xenophon, one might say, began the next
paragraph nearly as abruptly as Thucydides
ended his.
So it is certain that Thucydides’ work
was well known soon after publication and
that no more was ever published other than
the eight books that have survived; it may
reasonably be inferred from the silence of
the available sources that no separate
section of the work was published in his
lifetime. It may also be inferred that parts
of the History, and the last book in
particular, are defective, in the sense that
he would have written at greater length had
he known more and that he was trying still
to learn more—e.g., of internal Athenian
politics in the years of “uneasy truce.” His
existing narrative is in parts barely
understandable without some imaginative
guesswork.
It may be assumed, then, that there are
three fairly definable stages in his work:
first, the “notes” he made of events as they
occurred; secondly, the arrangement and
rewriting of these notes into a consecutive
narrative, as a “chronicle,” but by no means
in the final form that Thucydides intended;
thirdly, the final, elaborated narrative—of
the preliminaries of the war (Book i), of
the “Ten Years’ War,” and of the Athenian
expedition to conquer Sicily. Thucydides
supplemented his note stage throughout the
project; even the most elaborated parts of
the History may have been added right up to
the time of his death—certainly many
additions were made after the war was over.
All this is significant because
Thucydides was writing what few others have
attempted—a strictly contemporary history of
events that he lived through and that
succeeded each other almost throughout his
adult life. He endeavoured to do more than
merely record events, in some of which he
took an active part and in all of which he
was a direct or indirect spectator; he
attempted to write the final history for
later generations, and, as far as a man can
and as no other man has, he succeeded.
It is obvious that he did not rush his
work; the last of the complete narrative
(stage three, above) took him to the autumn
of 413, eight and a half years before the
end of the war, the last of stage two, to
six and a half years before. During these
last years he was observing, inquiring,
writing his notes, adding to or modifying
what he had already written; at no time
before the end, during all the 27 years of
the war, did he know what that end would be
nor, therefore, what would be the length and
the final shape of his own History. It is
evident that he did not long survive the war
since he did not leave any connected
account, even at stage two, of the last six
years. But in what he lived to complete, he
wrote a definitive history.
Character studies
Besides the political causes of the war,
Thucydides was interested in and emphasized
the conflict between two types of character:
the ever-active, innovating, revolutionary,
disturbing Athenians and the slower-moving,
more cautious Peloponnesians, especially the
Spartans, “not excited by success nor
despairing in misfortune,” but quietly
self-confident. Thucydides was not really
concerned with individuals but rather with
the actions, sufferings, and the characters
of states (“the Athenians,” “the Syracusans,”
etc.); but he did understand the
significance of personalities. Besides
depicting by their words and deeds the
characters of some who influenced
events—such as Cleon, the harsh demagogue of
Athens; Hermocrates, the would-be moderate
leader in Syracuse; the brave Nicostratus;
and the incompetent Alcidas—he goes out of
his way to give a clear picture of the
characters and influence of four men:
Themistocles (in a digression, the Athenian
hero of the Second Persian War), Pericles,
Brasidas, and Alcibiades. All four of them
were of the active, revolutionary type.
Pericles of Athens was indeed unique for
Thucydides in that he combined caution and
moderation in action and great stability of
character with a daring imagination and
intellect; he was a leader of the new age.
During the war each of them—Pericles and
Alcibiades in Athens, Brasidas in Sparta—was
in conflict with a conservative, quietist
opposition within his own country.
The conflict between the revolutionary
and the conservative also extended between
the generally daring Athenian state and the
generally cautious Peloponnesians. It is a
great loss that Thucydides did not live to
write the story of the last years of the
war, when Lysander, the other great
revolutionary Spartan, played a larger part
than any other single man in the defeat of
Athens. This defeat was, in one aspect, the
defeat of intellectual brilliance and daring
by “stolidity” and stability of character
(this last the quality most lacking in
Alcibiades, the most brilliant Athenian of
the second half of the war); but it was
largely brought about by Brasidas and
Lysander, the two Spartans who rivaled the
Athenians in daring and intellect.
Study of the war’s technical aspects
Thucydides was also interested in the
technical aspect of the war. The most
important problems in the war, besides
protecting food supplies during land
fighting, centred around the difficulties
and possibilities of war between an
all-powerful land force (Sparta and its
allies) and an all-powerful naval force
(Athens). Thucydides also studied the
details of siege warfare; the difficulties
of the heavily armed combat in mountain
country and of fighting against the fierce
but unruly barbarians of the north; an army
trying to force a landing from ships against
troops on shore; the one great night battle,
at Syracuse; the skill and the daring
maneuvers of the Athenian sailors and the
way these maneuvers were overcome by the
Syracusans; the unexpected recovery of the
Athenian fleet after the Sicilian
disaster—in all these aspects of the war he
took a keen professional interest.
In Thucydides’ introductory pages on the
early history of Greece he lays much stress
on the development of sea trading and naval
power and on the accumulation of capital
resources: they help to explain the great
war between a land power and a sea power.
Style and historical aims
Thucydides was himself an intellectual
of the Athenian kind; markedly
individualistic, his style shows a man
brought up in the company of Sophocles and
Euripides, the playwrights, and the
philosophers Anaxagoras, Socrates, and the
contemporary Sophists. His writing is
condensed and direct, almost austere in
places, and is meant to be read rather than
delivered orally. He explains in a
scientific and impartial manner the
intricacies and complexities of the events
he observed. Only in his speeches does he
sometimes fall short of the lucidity of the
narrative prose; his fondness for abstract
expressions and the obscurity of his
rhetorical antithesis often make the
passages difficult to understand.
In a prefatory note near the beginning of
the History, Thucydides speaks a little of
the nature of his task and of his aims. It
was difficult, he says, to arrive at the
truth of the speeches made—whether he heard
them himself or received a report from
others—and of the actions of the war. For
the latter, even if he himself observed a
particular battle, he made as thorough an
enquiry as he could—for he realized that
eyewitnesses, either from faulty memory or
from bias, were not always reliable.
He wrote the speeches out of his own
words, appropriate to the occasion, keeping
as closely as possible to the general sense
of what had actually been said. He could
never have omitted them, for it is through
the speeches that he explains the motives
and ambitions of the leading men and states;
and this, the study of the human mind in
time of war, is one of his principal aims.
(The omission of speeches from the last book
is a great loss and is caused, no doubt, by
the difficulty he had in getting information
about Athens at this period.) He avoided, he
says, all “storytelling” (this is a
criticism of Herodotus), and his work might
be the less attractive in consequence;but I
have written not for immediate applause but
for posterity, and I shall be content if the
future student of these events, or of other
similar events which are likely in human
nature to occur in after ages, finds my
narrative of them useful.
This is all that he expressly tells of his
aim and methods. Moreover, in the course of
his narrative (except for the pestilence of
430 and his command in 424) he never gives
his authority for a statement. He does not
say which of the speeches he actually heard,
which of the other campaigns he took part
in, what places he visited, or what persons
he consulted. Thucydides insisted in doing
all the work himself; and he provides, for
the parts he completed, only the finished
structure, not the plans or the
consultations.
Authority of his work
He kept to a strict chronological
scheme, and, where it can be accurately
tested by the eclipses that he mentions, it
fits closely. There are also a fair number
of contemporary documents recorded on stone,
most of which confirm his account both in
general and in detail. There is the silent
testimony of the three historians who began
where he left off, not attempting, in spite
of much independence of opinion, to revise
what he had already done, not even the last
book, which he clearly did not complete.
Another historian, Philistus, a Syracusan
who was a boy during the Athenian siege of
his city, had little to alter or to add to
Thucydides’ account in his own History of
Sicily. Above all, there are the
contemporary political comedies of
Aristophanes—a man about 15 years younger
than Thucydides with as different a temper
and writing purpose as could be—which
remarkably reinforce the reliability of the
historian’s dark picture of Athens at war.
The modern historian of this war is in much
the same position as the ancient: he cannot
do much more than translate, abridge, or
enlarge upon Thucydides.
For Thucydides kept rigidly to his theme:
the history of a war—that is, a story of
battles and sieges, of alliances hastily
made and soon broken, and, most important,
of the behaviour of peoples as the war
dragged on and on, of the inevitable
“corrosion of the human spirit.” He vividly
narrates exciting episodes and carefully
describes tactics on land and sea. He gives
a picture, direct in speeches, indirect in
the narrative, of the ambitious imperialism
of Athens—controlled ambition in Pericles,
reckless in Alcibiades, debased in
Cleon—ever confident that nothing was
impossible for them, resilient after the
worst disaster. He shows also the opposing
picture of the slow steadiness of Sparta,
sometimes so successful, at other times so
accommodating to the enemy.
His record of Pericles’ speech on those
killed in the first year of the war is the
most glowing account of Athens and Athenian
democracy that any leading citizen could
hope to hear. It is followed (in, of course,
due chronological order) by a minutely
accurate account of the symptoms of the
pestilence (“so that it may be recognized by
medical men if it recurs”) and a moving
description of the demoralizing despair that
overtook men after so much suffering and
such heavy losses—probably more than a
quarter of the population, most of it
crowded within the walls of the city, died.
Equally moving is the account of the last
battles in the great harbour of Syracuse and
of the Athenian retreat. In one of his
best-known passages he analyzes by a most
careful choice of words, almost creating the
language as he writes, the moral and
political effects of civil strife within a
state in time of war. By a different method,
in speeches, he portrays the hard fate of
the town of Plataea due to the
long-embittered envy and cruelty of Thebes
and the faithlessness of Sparta, and the
harsh brutality of Cleon when he proposed to
execute all the men of the Aegean island
city of Mytilene. Occasionally, he is forced
into personal comment, as on the pathetic
fate of the virtuous and much-liked Athenian
Nicias.
He had strong feelings, both as a man and
as a citizen of Athens. He was filled with a
passion for the truth as he saw it, which
not only kept him free from vulgar
partiality against the enemy but served him
as a historian in the accurate narrative of
events—accurate in their detail and order
and also in their relative importance. He
does not, for example, exaggerate the
significance of the campaign he himself
commanded, nor does he offer a self-defense
for his failure. Characteristically, he
mentions his exile not as an event of the
war but in his “second preface”—after the
peace of 421—to explain his opportunities of
wider contacts.
Subsequent fame
The story of his later fame is a curious
one. It has been mentioned above that in the
two generations after his death three
historians began their work where he had
left off; but, apart from this silent
tribute and late stories of his great
influence on the orator Demosthenes,
Thucydides is nowhere referred to in
surviving 4th-century literature, not even
in Aristotle, who, in his Constitution of
Athens, describes the revolution in Athens
in 411 and diverges in many ways from
Thucydides’ account.
It was not until the end of the 4th
century that the philosopher Theophrastus
coupled Thucydides with Herodotus as a
founder of the writing of history. Little is
known of what the scholars of Alexandria and
Pergamum did for his book; but copies of it
were being made in considerable numbers in
Egypt and so, doubtless, elsewhere, from the
1st to the 5th century ad. By the 1st
century bc, as is clear from the writings of
Cicero and Dionysius (who vainly disputed
his preeminence), Thucydides was established
as the great historian, and since that time
his fame has been secure.
Encyclopædia Britannica
