Thucydides

/thooh sid"i deez'/, n. c460-c400 B.C.

Greek historian.

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born с 460

died с 404 BC

Greatest of ancient Greek historians.

An Athenian who commanded a fleet in the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides failed to prevent the capture of the important city of Amphipolis and consequently was exiled for 20 years. During that period he wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War; evidently he did not live to complete it, for it stops abruptly in 411 BC. It presents the first recorded political and moral analysis of a nation's war policies, treating the causes of the conflict, the characters of the two states, and the technical aspects of warfare in a carefully drawn, strictly chronological narrative of events, including some in which he took an active part.

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▪ Greek historian

Introduction

born 460 BC or earlier?

died after 404 BC?

 greatest of ancient Greek historians (historiography) 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 (strategus), 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 (Miltiades the Younger), 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 (Theopompus of Chios) (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 (Sparta), “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; (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.

Arnold Wycombe Gomme

Additional Reading

Great older translations are the 1629 version by Thomas Hobbes (trans.), The Pelopponesian War, ed. by David Grene (1959, reissued 1989); Benjamin Jowett (trans.), Thucydides Translated into English, 2 vol. (1881, reissued 1998); and Richard Crawley (trans.), The History of the Pelopponesian War (1874, reissued 2004). Important 20th-century translations are Rex Warner (trans.), History of the Pelopponesian War (1954, reissued 1986); and Steven Lattimore (trans.), The Pelopponesian War (1998).The standard modern commentary is A.W. Gomme, Antony Andrewes, and K.J. Dover, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, 5 vol. (1945–81). Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides (1991– ), is expected to be complete in three volumes. David Cartwright, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides: A Companion to Rex Warner's Penguin Translation (1997), is designed for undergraduates.Analytical works of value include H.D. Westlake, Individuals in Thucydides (1968), Essays on Greek Historians and Greek History (1969), and Studies in Thucydides and Greek History (1989); Hunter R. Rawlings III, The Structure of Thucydides' History (1981); and Nanno Marinatos, Thucydides and Religion (1981). Also useful are W. Robert Connor, Thucydides (1984); Simon Hornblower, Thucydides (1987); Gregory Crane, The Blinded Eye: Thucydides and the New Written Word (1996), and Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity (1998); and Tim Rood, Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation (1998).Works addressed to the general reader include Antonios Rengakos and Antonis Tsakmakis (eds.), Brill's Companion to Thucydides (2006); and Emily Greenwood, Thucydides and the Shaping of History (2006).

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