Thucydides

Circa 455-Circa 395 b.c.e.

Historian and general

Sources

Great Work . Thucydides, an Athenian historian and general, wrote History of the Peloponnesian War, which is widely regarded as the greatest historical work of the ancient world. He was born of a wealthy family with strong Thracian connections, but became a strong supporter of Pericles, the democratic leader whose figure overshadows all subsequent Athenian politicians in Thucydides’ work. Thucydides caught the plague that ravaged Athens early in the war, but recovered. He was elected general but in 424 b.c.e. failed to prevent the Spartan general Brasidas from taking Amphipolis in Thrace. Exiled for this failure, Thucydides returned to Athens at the end of the war and seems to have died shortly afterwards.

Deeds and Words . Thucydides’ account of the war is unfinished and ends in mid-narrative, describing the events of 411 b.c.e., but there are references in the work to Athens’ ultimate defeat. Thucydides tells the reader that he began keeping notes from the war’s outbreak, but the order and date of the composition of the various parts have been subject to endless scrutiny. As the work stands, it is divided as its author stated into deeds and words: the narrative description of the events of the war, and the various speeches of a highly concentrated and abstract nature, supposedly reporting the words of important players in the conflict: a Spartan envoy, an Athenian in the assembly, a general before a battle, and so on. The style of these speeches is exceptionally bracing and difficult (and was found so by Greek scholars in later antiquity), so it is hard to believe that anything in such a style could have been delivered before large audiences; but at a more basic level it is quite unclear whether it was Thucydides’ intention to present what was actually said or what the most powerful argument on any occasion would have been. Either way, the speeches are amongst the finest documents to survive in Greek for their combination of intellectual rigor and passion, above all in Pericles’ famous defense of Athenian democracy in his Funeral speech. The narrative of events, often written with an almost clinical detachment and absence of moral judgements, also manages to focus our attentions on human psychology and suffering in a way that shows the clear influence of tragedy. Indeed, for all the undoubted influence of contemporary intellectual forces such as scientific medicine and rhetoric on his work, the overwhelming influence of myth has been detected in its structure and story.

Sources

Mortimer Chambers, “Thucydides,” in Anicent Greek Authors, Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 176, edited by Ward W. Briggs (Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli Clark Layman/Detroit: Gale Research, 1997), pp. 381-389.

K. J. Dover, Thucydides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).