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.
