The Greek historian Thucydides (ca. 460-ca. 401 B.C.) wrote on the Peloponnesian War. The greatest ancient historian, he is in a real sense the creator of modern historiography.

Little is known about the life of Thucydides Most modern scholars place his birth between 460 and 450 B.C., with a preference for the earlier date. Thucydides was from the deme of Halimus and was the son of Olorus and Hegesipyle. He is thus to be distinguished from a contemporary of the same name, the son of Melesias, who led the opposition party against Pericles. The historian's family was wealthy from the possession of gold mines in Scapte Hyle on the Thracian coast opposite Thasos. Thucydides may have been related to a Thracian prince whose daughter married the famous Athenian general Miltiades and became the mother of the general and statesman Cimon. The grave of Thucydides was located near that of Cimon in a place named Koile, southwest of the Athenian Acropolis, where Plutarch saw it.

About Thucydides's education we know practically nothing. He is reported to have studied oratory under Antiphon and philosophy under Anaxagoras. There is little doubt that he was a product of the Sophistic movement. He was well acquainted with his predecessors in the field of Greek history, and he is said to have burst into tears when he listened to Herodotus recite his History.

Thucydides caught the plague during the epidemic of 430-427 and was among the lucky few who recovered. In 424 he was one of the Athenian generals operating in the Chalcidice during the Peloponnesian War (431-404). Through a miscarriage of planning, Amphipolis was captured by the Spartan general Brasidas, the greatest general of the war. Having failed to relieve Amphipolis, Thucydides was exiled for 20 years. It is said that the demagogue Cleon was instrumental in bringing about his exile. Thucydides spent his exile on family estates in Thrace. This enforced leisure gave him the time to observe critically the course of the war. It is considered certain that he returned to Athens after the war. He apparently lived there, utterly forgotten, until his death sometime toward the beginning of the 4th century.

Thucydides writes of himself in the third person in his History. He relates that he was a general at the age of 30 (4.104); indicated that he was of the age of discretion during the entire war (5.26.5); expresses his pride as a soldier and his devotion to Pericles (2.31); defends the generals at Megara (4.73.4); reveals that he owns property in the mining district in Thrace (4.105.1); and relates the fact of his exile and the circumstances surrounding it (5.26).

His Work

The only extant work by Thucydides is the incomplete History of the Peloponnesian War in eight books. The History practically covers the major portion of the Peloponnesian War: the First Phase (431-420 B.C.) - the Archidamian War; the Second Phase (415-413) - the Sicilian Expedition; and the Third Phase (413-404) - the lonian, or Decelean, War. He apparently did not live to complete the final section. The text of Thucydides has come down emended by editors, and it is difficult and oftentimes obscure. It is important to note that no Attic prose was taught prior to Thucydides, so he had to create a prose style of his own.

Thucydides is the first historian in the modern sense - that is, he strives for accuracy and impartiality. His accounts of military campaigns and battles show this and point up the fact that he himself was an experienced military man. He reveals a reluctance to accept unsupported statements, and he carefully weighs and sifts the statements of others. He consulted actual documents and even inserted them into his text. This scholarship and meticulousness were obviously a result of Sophistic influence and training.

Thucydides had been familiar with the work of his predecessors in Greek historiography, though nowhere does he mention anyone by name except for Hellanicus of Mitylene, and he criticizes Mitylene severely for his lack of chronological exactitude in his account of the period between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars. Of his predecessors in general, Thucydides was highly critical because they accepted traditions without validating the veracity of them (1.20) and because they were too willing to please rather than be critical (1.21). Also, he pointed out that his predecessors did not exclude myths from their histories (1.22.4).

Although Thucydides at no time mentions his great predecessor Herodotus by name, he does correct a number of passages in Herodotus's History; for example, 1.126.7 is an expanded and corrected version of Herodotus 5.71; 1.1.20 clarifies Herodotus 9.53; and the so called Pentecontaetia (1.89) commences where Herodotus left off. The famous Thucydidean remark that he intended his work to be a possession forever seems to echo Herodotus's opening remarks about the Persian War.

Thucydides is responsible for making history much more comprehensive than it had ever been. The chain of cause and effect was elaborately worked out. Thucydides is no mere writer of history; he is a philosopher of history. There are no divine or supernatural forces at work in his History. All phenomena are explained in human terms, in terms of cold political power. Power politics and the inhumanity of man to man are devastatingly observed by Thucydides as the real factors of history. Real issues and causes are never avoided.

There is a philosophic strain in the History, but there is a patriotic one as well. Thucydides remembered and admired the greatness of Pericles and the Athens with which he is so closely and so gloriously associated to the end. Even though he tried to be impartial, Thucydides believed Athens would be triumphant in the end, but he was fair to Sparta and careful to point out the inadequacies and deficiencies of Athens.

In addition to narrative, which he employs with great facility and clarity, Thucydides dramatizes history through speeches put directly in the mouths of those who need never have spoken them. These speeches are rhetorical devices, fictional in presentation but factual in their content. Each speech is the kind of thing the particular speaker would probably have said. The speeches show Thucydides's amazing use of antithesis and the antithetical technique, which, though undoubtedly inherited from the Sophists, was greatly developed by Thucydides himself. The whole History is a study in antithesis. Thucydides himself does not conceal the fact that the speeches are merely literary devices, with his own best literary efforts concentrated there. He even personified different peoples by differing speech. Fine rhetoric, striking phrases, nice distinctions in meaning, and wonderful periodic sentences (again showing Sophistic training and influence) characterize his speeches.

Though recent scholarship has looked at Thucydides with a good deal of critical acumen and has delighted in being able to correct him in some details, he still ranks as one of the greatest historians of all time. He introduced to history the objective, critical approach which generations of historians followed. He was ahead of his time not only in methodology but also in his interest and emphasis on the development and exposition of a philosophy of history.

Further Reading

Modern works on Thucydides are plentiful and of high quality. The following should be consulted: F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus (1907); J. B. Bury, The Ancient Historians (1909); G. B. Grundy, Thucydides and the History of His Age (1911); W. R. M. Lamb, Clio Enthroned (1914); C.F. Abbott, Thucydides: A Study in Historical Reality (1925); B.W. Henderson, The Great War between Athens and Sparta (1927); C. N. Cochrane, Thucydides and the Science of History (1929); A. W. Gomme, Essays in Greek History and Literature (1937); and John H. Finley, Jr., Thucydides (1942). In addition, Finley's Three Essays on Thucydides (1967) is important for seeing the unity of the History and the fact that Thucydides wrote from personal knowledge of the full 27 years of the Peloponnesian War.

H.D. Westlake, Individuals in Thucydides (1968), is an outstanding study of the leading individuals in the History, and his Essays on the Greek Historians and Greek History (1969) deals primarily with specialized topics in Thucydides. A very exciting book is A. Geoffrey Woodhead, Thucydides on the Nature of Power (1970). It demonstrates that Thucydides's interpretation of power is relevant to modern discussions of power politics.

(460-c. 404 bc) Thucydides' account of The Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta is one of the classic pieces of writing on war. Thucydides, himself a failed Athenian admiral, wrote a detailed history of the war which, unlike the writings of his contemporaries, explained events by reference to the interplay of personalities and power rather than by the divine intervention of the gods. Above all, his account is written from a realist perspective which seeks to explain and understand rather than to moralize about war, although he does moralize implicitly and explicitly about the domestic pressures for war.

His analysis of the origins of the war is strictly realist: he refers to various complaints of Athens and Sparta against each other but notes that such complaints disguise the true cause, which was ‘the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta’. In the Mytilenian Debate and in the Melian Dialogue he represents the dilemmas which confront statesmen in war. In the Melian Dialogue the Athenians, who have occupied the small island of Melos, demand unconditional surrender from their opponents on the grounds of the superiority of their power which renders the Melians powerless to resist. The arguments used by the Athenians in persuading the Melians to surrender are immediately familiar to modern realists. The Melians are finally all killed or sold into slavery.

Thucydides explains the eventual Spartan defeat of Athens by the decline in the wisdom of Athenian statesmanship after the death of Pericles and a disastrous expedition to Sicily which caused, to use a modern term, an ‘overextension’ of Athenian power.

— Peter Byrd

For more information on Thucydides, visit Britannica.com.

Thūcydidēs (Thoukȳdidēs). 1. Athenian politician, born c.500 BC. He succeeded Cimon (a relative by marriage) as leader of the wealthy aristocratic and oligarchical faction, and was the political enemy of Pericles, whose use of tribute money from the Delian League for building works in Athens he attacked. He was ostracized in perhaps 443 BC. In his old age he was brought to trial in a manner condemned by Aristophanes. He is mentioned by Pindar as a famous trainer of wrestlers.

2. Greek historian, author of the (incomplete) History of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431–404 BC), in eight books. He was born probably between 460 and 455 BC and died c.399; he caught the plague at some time between 430 and 427 but recovered from it. As strategos in 424 he was sent to protect the coast of Thrace from the Spartan general Brasidas but failed to save Athens' valuable colony of Amphipolis from falling into Spartan hands, and was condemned in his absence and exiled. He returned to Athens twenty years later when the war was over, and died within a few years; there was a tradition that he was assassinated. He seems to have been related to Cimon and Thucydides (1) above.

Thucydides had intended to take his history down to the fall of Athens in 404, but the narrative breaks off in mid-sentence with the events of the winter 411/10. Its continuation by Theopompus and Cratippus is lost, together with the rest of their works. Thucydides says that at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War he realized that it would have a greater importance in the history of Greece than any previous wars (including the Persian Wars) and would be for that reason more worth writing about. Since he spent most of the war in exile and removed from the immediate action, he was in a good position to gain first-hand information from both sides and to have a clearer perspective. His object was to provide an accurate record of what happened and to be instructive, because knowledge of the past is a useful guide to the future. His work was to be a ‘possession for all time’ (ktēma es aiei) not something ‘written for display, to make an immediate impression’. A feature of the history is the reporting of speeches, for which he does not claim the same degree of accuracy as for events. With regard to these speeches he says that he kept as closely as possible to the sense of what was actually spoken while setting out the arguments which in his opinion the situation required. The speeches serve to reveal the policies or attitudes which lay behind the decisions of the generals and politicians who made them. Often he presents the speeches of two opponents advocating opposite courses of action. Since all the speeches are reported in Thucydides' own idiosyncratic style, some critics have thought that they must be his original compositions, designed to make clear in dramatic form what Thucydides thought to be the fundamental issues, but this is to disbelieve his statement to the contrary. Some critics have also felt that in his search below the surface for underlying causes he resembles the scientists and physicians of his day (see, for example, HIPPOCRATES); in his analysis of the causes of the Peloponnesian War he distinguishes between the immediate causes and pretexts—quarrels about the alliances of lesser city states, Corcyra and Potidaea—and the primary cause, Sparta's fear of Athenian expansion. It is possible that this last was added at a later stage of composition, with the benefit of deeper reflection.

Of the eight books, book 1 comprises an introduction, giving a brief summary of early Greek history (the so-called ‘Archaeology’, chapters 1–23) and the author's aims in writing the work, a description of events at Corcyra and Potidaea, and the political manœuvrings of 433–432, followed by a history of the growth of Athenian power during the years 479 to 435 (chapters 89–118, the Pentekontaetia). Books 2–5. 24 describe the main events of the first ten years of war, 431–421, known as the Archidamian War; they include Pericles' Funeral Oration at the end of the first year of war (2. 34–46), the plague at Athens (2. 47–54), the revolt at Mitylene in 428/7 (3. 1–50), the destruction of Plataea in 427 (3. 51–68), civil war in Corcyra in 427 (3. 69–86), the capture of the Spartan garrison on Sphacteria in 425 (4. 1–42), the loss of Amphipolis to Brasidas (4. 102–116), and the deaths of Cleon and Brasidas and the Peace of Nicias (5. 1–24). The rest of book 5 describes the precarious peace, the Mantinea campaign 418–417 (63–83), and ends with the destruction of Melos in 415. Books 6 and 7 are devoted to the Sicilian Expedition. Book 8, which is incomplete and contains no speeches, covers the beginning of the so-called Decelean War (413–404) and describes the revolt of the Athenian allies and the naval warfare off the coast of Asia Minor, before stopping in 411.

Thucydides displayed a passion for accuracy and exactness that no other ancient historian approached and which was probably a product of his own individuality as much as the result of influence from contemporary scientific writers. Moreover, he saw history as explicable entirely in human terms without recourse to the supernatural; omens and oracles earned his contemptuous dismissal. He reported what could be observed, and did not ponder what part if any the gods played in it. He is generally impartial, although it has been felt that his view of Pericles was too favourable and his portrait of a detestable Cleon somewhat prejudiced. His subject is treated with the utmost seriousness and at a high level; there is no room for anecdote or scandal or hearsay, and certainly no room for the romantic. Apart from Thucydides we have no history of the Peloponnesian War; we cannot, except in rare cases, know what he has chosen to omit or test the accuracy of what he includes. His overall attitude is the only justification for our acceptance of his picture of events, both of the facts he gives and his interpretation of them.

His brilliant but difficult style is wellsuited to the narration of great events. It has a poetic flavour apparent in, for example, his occasional use of Ionic dialect forms which sound old-fashioned in the context of his normal Attic usage (see DIALECTS 2); other poeticisms include making abstract nouns like ‘war’ or ‘hope’ sound like personifications, and using an unnatural word-order, for emphasis. Thucydides' sentences, though not usually short, show remarkable compression, the meaning telescoped into a few words, his rapidity of thought achieved by a plentiful use of abstract nouns. This impression of concentration is particularly apparent in the speeches.

(thūsĭd'ĭdēz) , c.460–c.400 B.C., Greek historian of Athens, one of the greatest of ancient historians. His family was partly Thracian. As a general in the Peloponnesian War he failed (424 B.C.) to prevent the surrender of the city of Amphipolis to the Spartan commander Brasidas and was exiled until the end of the war. He thus had opportunity to acquaint himself with both the Athenians and the Spartans and to acquire firsthand information for his one work, the incomplete History of the Peloponnesian War. It covered the period from 431 to 411 and was a departure from the histories of the past, both in method and presentation. He wrote a text to be read, not recited, and he was scrupulous in his presentation of facts. Preeminently a military history, chronicling events by the seasons, it completely avoids any reference to social conditions or state policy, unless they have to deal with the progress of the war, and interprets the succession of events in view of the general nature and behavior of man rather than as the result of a fate outside man's influence. The work is enlivened by the well-crafted speeches he puts into the mouths of participants in the events he chronicles, a common technique in his day. The most splendid of these is Pericles' funeral oration. Thucydides' account of the plague, through which he lived, displays his clinical and descriptive attitude and is a standard of its type. He is generally acclaimed as the creator of scholarly history as we know it today. The classic English translation of the History is that of Thomas Hobbes (1629; ed. by David Grene, 1959); modern translations include those by Richard Crawley (1910, repr. 1952), Rex Warner (1954), and R. W. Livingstone (1960).

Bibliography

See studies by J. H. Finley (1942, repr. 1967), G. B. Grundy (2d ed. 1948), H. D. Westlake (1968), and A. G. Woodhead (1970); A. W. Gomme et al., A Historical Commentary on Thucydides (5 vol., 1945–78).

(thooh-sid-uh-deez)

An ancient Greek historian and general. Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War, in which he fought, is famous for its careful reporting of events and its sharp analysis of causes and effects.

Quotes:

"The secret of freedom, courage."

"The secret of Happiness is Freedom, and the secret of Freedom, Courage."

"Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved."

"Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war."

"Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. We do not copy our neighbours, but are an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognised; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his condition."

"An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character, and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy."

See more famous quotes by Thucydides

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