Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War

THE fame of ancient wars is commonly fashioned by myth and romance. Helen of Troy, the pass of Thermopylae, Alexander, Hannibal these are the people and the incidents that keep wars alive in popular imagination. But not so the Peloponnesian War (as we call it), fought between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404, with a scarcely honoured seven-year peace in the middle. That war lives on not so much for anything that happened or because of any of the participants, but because of the man who wrote its history, Thucydides the Athenian. No other historian can match this achievement; no other war, or for that matter no other historical subject, is so much the product of its reporter.

That is achievement enough. It becomes even greater when we look more closely at the man and his book. All that we know about Thucydides is found in the few scraps he tells us himself, and in a short, eccentric and unreliable biography from late antiquity credited to someone named Marcellinus. Clearly he was a humourless man, pessimistic, sceptical, highly intelligent, cold and reserved, at least on the surface, but with strong inner tensions which occasionally broke through the impersonal tone of his writing in savage whiplash comments, such as Hyperbolus, a wretched character, who had been ostracized, not because anyone was afraid of his power and prestige, but because he was a thoroughly bad lot and a disgrace to the city (VIII, 73). He wrote in a complicated style, overloaded and lacking in charm. Not that he was indifferent to language and its nuances; on the contrary, correct use of language was for him a moral question, its debasement a symptom of moral breakdown. Summing up the consequences of stasis (civil war), he wrote:

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise ones unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action (III, 82).

In his struggle to convey the sense of an action or a statement precisely, Thucydides juggled tenses in a sophisticated way, piled up subordinate clauses and resorted to other devices that are often the despair of modern readers. (A surprising proportion of commentaries is given over to sorting out just what Thucydides was trying to say in any particular passage.) Neither in style nor in treatment of his subject did he make the slightest concession to his audience. Nothing mattered but the events and the issues; these he would get right by dedicated effort, by devotion to accuracy and understanding, and he would report his findings without adornment.

And it may well be that my history will seem less easy to read because of the absence in it of a romantic element (to mythodes). It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the needs of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever (I, 22).

Thucydides was a young man, probably in his late twenties, when the war began. It is a guess that he was born about 460 B.C., but a good guess. He had to be old enough to hold the office of strategos (general) in 424, for which the minimum age was probably thirty, and at the same time young enough to warrant the rather defensive remark he inserted in what is now conventionally known as the Second Introduction:

I myself remember that all the time from the beginning to the end of the war it was being put about by many people that the war would last thrice nine years. I lived through the whole of it,