Thucydides

• 1. Introduction

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  Thucydides, born around 460 BC, set out to record a war he was certain would be unlike any other. He was an Athenian general who fought in that war, caught its plague, and was then exiled for failing to relieve the city of Amphipolis. None of that stopped him. Stripped of military command and free to travel among Athens's enemies, he turned catastrophe into method. The result was the History of the Peloponnesian War, a text that modern universities and military colleges still assign more than two thousand years after it was written. What drove a disgraced general to write what the historian J. B. Bury later called "the longest and most decisive step that has ever been taken by a single man towards making history what it is today"? And how did a book that breaks off mid-sentence in the year 411 BC become required reading at the Naval War College in Rhode Island?

• 2. A Life Interrupted

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  Olorus was the name of Thucydides's father, and that name carried weight. Herodotus noted that Olorus was connected with Thrace and with Thracian royalty. Through his father's family, Thucydides was probably linked to the Athenian statesman Miltiades and his son Cimon, figures of the old aristocracy who had been displaced by the Radical Democrats. That lineage helps explain the gold mines at Scapte Hyle, a coastal area in Thrace opposite the island of Thasos, which the family owned and which gave Thucydides the income he would later depend on as an exile.

  A disputed anecdote places the young Thucydides, aged ten to twelve, at the agora of Athens listening to a lecture by the historian Herodotus. One account claims Thucydides wept with joy and that Herodotus afterwards told his father, "Oloros your son yearns for knowledge." The episode is almost certainly a later invention, but it signals how closely ancient tradition bound these two figures together.

  In 424 BC, the Athenians sent Thucydides as a strategos to Thasos. That winter, the Spartan general Brasidas attacked Amphipolis, a half-day's sail west along the Thracian coast. The Athenian commander Eucles sent urgently for Thucydides. Brasidas knew Thucydides was near and moved fast, offering the Amphipolitans moderate terms before relief could arrive by sea. By the time Thucydides reached the area, Amphipolis had already fallen. Athens blamed him. He was exiled, and he would remain exiled for twenty years.

• 3. Exile as Method

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  "I lived through the whole of it, being of an age to comprehend events, and giving my attention to them in order to know the exact truth about them." That is Thucydides speaking about his exile, and he goes on to say something that modern historians find remarkable: being exiled let him spend time "with both parties, and more especially with the Peloponnesians by reason of my exile," giving him leisure to observe the war from both sides.

  The gold mines at Scapte Hyle funded this unusual position. Once expelled from Athenian political life, Thucydides settled on the family estate in Thrace and used his substantial income to conduct historical research full-time. He was, as a later summary of his situation put it, a well-connected gentleman of considerable resources who, after involuntarily retiring from political and military affairs, chose to fund his own investigations.

  He had already begun writing the History at the very outbreak of hostilities in 431 BC. His own stated reason was that he believed the coming war would prove "a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it." He intended the work to be "a possession for all time." His narrative breaks off in the middle of 411 BC, roughly mid-sentence, twenty years before his death as best scholars can estimate. Whether he died at his estate in Thrace or was murdered returning to Athens after a law was passed allowing his return, the text ended where it did, leaving the final seven years of the conflict unrecorded.

• 4. The Method Inside the History

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  Thucydides placed formal speeches throughout the History and was candid about what they were: not verbatim records but literary reconstructions of what was said, or perhaps what he believed ought to have been said. He consulted written documents and interviewed participants. He valued eyewitness testimony above all else. Unlike Herodotus, he did not acknowledge divine intervention in human affairs, and unlike Herodotus he did not name his sources.

  Pericles' Funeral Oration is the most celebrated product of this method. Thucydides uses it to articulate a defence of Athenian democracy: "The whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; they are honoured not only by columns and inscriptions in their own land, but in foreign nations on memorials graven not on stone but in the hearts and minds of men." (2:43) The oration is placed immediately before his description of the Athenian plague, a pairing that generates a sharp contrast between civic idealism and the horror of mass death.

  The plague passages are among the most visceral writing in ancient historiography. Thucydides described bodies lying unburied in the streets, the living too sick to care for the dead, and survivors dragging corpses onto strangers' funeral pyres. He also recorded something physicians now recognize as an early observation of acquired immunity: those who survived the plague did not catch it again. The historian H. D. Kitto observed that several passages in the History are written "with an intensity of feeling hardly exceeded by Sappho herself."

• 5. Political Realism and Its Discontents

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  The Melian dialogue, in which Athens demands the submission of the small island of Melos and dismisses talk of justice as irrelevant between unequal powers, is now studied as a foundational text of international relations theory. Thucydides presents the dialogue without editorial comment, which is itself a kind of statement. Francis Cornford described Thucydides's political vision in terms of a tragic ethics: man moves along a narrow path, "lighted only by a few dim rays of human 'foresight' (gnome), or by the false, wandering fires of Hope."

  Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan argued for absolute monarchy, translated Thucydides directly from Greek into English in 1628, the first such translation. Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Thucydides are grouped together as founding figures of Western political realism, a tradition holding that state policy must rest on military and economic power rather than ethics. J. B. Bury noted the parallel between the two thinkers plainly: "the whole innuendo of the Thucydidean treatment of history agrees with the fundamental postulate of Machiavelli, the supremacy of reason of state."

  Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, called Thucydides "the greatest historian, perhaps, who ever lived," while also insisting that readers must never forget his "involuntary bias" and that "his heart was not with Athens, his native city." Irving Kristol, who described himself as the founder of American neoconservatism, called the History "the favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs." Meanwhile, scholar Richard Ned Lebow places Thucydides in a different tradition entirely, calling him "the last of the tragedians" and arguing that he drew heavily on epic poetry and tragedy to frame his narrative as a warning against immoderate behaviour.

• 6. Thucydides Against Herodotus

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  Thucydides never names Herodotus directly, but his famous opening declaration that the History is compiled "rather for an everlasting possession than to be rehearsed for a prize" is widely read as a jab at Herodotus, whose Histories were recited at festivals including the games at Olympia, where prizes were awarded.

  The contrast in method was stark. Herodotus recorded ethnographic information, geographical observation, and fables gathered across his travels. He presented conflicting accounts side by side and invited readers to judge for themselves. Thucydides stripped geography, ethnography, and personal moral judgment out of his text entirely. He saw history as political history, and political history as the only kind worth writing.

  Yet the two traditions never simply won or lost against each other. During the Middle Ages, both were largely forgotten in Western Europe, though they continued to influence Byzantine scholarship. Lorenzo Valla produced the first European Latin translation of Thucydides between 1448 and 1452. Aldo Manuzio published the first printed Greek edition in 1502. In the Renaissance, Thucydides attracted less attention in Western Europe as a political philosopher than his successor Polybius, while Herodotus found new audiences through the discovery of America, whose unfamiliar peoples and animals seemed to echo what Herodotus had described in his own travels.

  In the twentieth century, Thucydides's influence shaped the Cold War international relations thinking of Hans Morgenthau, Leo Strauss, and Edward Carr. Herodotus, by contrast, became the choice of novelists and, as one scholar put it, "food for a starved soul" for writers like Ryszard Kapuscinski, a foreign correspondent from Iron Curtain Poland. The Greek historian Lucian had long ago articulated Thucydides's standard for his successors: to say what had been done, in Greek, "hos eprachthe." That standard outlasted the civilization that produced it.