Thucydides
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- For the homonymous Athenian politician, see Thucydides (politician).
Thucydides (between 460 and 455 BC–circa 400 BC, Greek Θουκυδίδης, Thoukudídēs) was an ancient Greek historian, and the author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, which recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens. This is widely considered the first work of scientific history, describing the human world as produced by men acting from ordinary motives, without the intervention of the gods.
Life
Almost everything we know about the life of Thucydides comes from his own History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides' father was Olorus,1 a name connected with Thrace and Thracian royalty.2 He was a man of influence and wealth. He owned gold mines at Scapte Hyle, a district of Thrace on the Thracian coast opposite the island of Thasos.3 Thucydides, born in Alimos, was connected through family to the Athenian statesman and general Miltiades, and his son Cimon, leaders of the old aristocracy supplanted by the Radical Democrats. Thucydides lived between his two homes, in Athens and in Thrace. His family connections brought him into contact with the very men who were shaping the history he wrote about.He was probably in his twenties when the Peloponnesian War began in 431 BC. He contracted the plague4 that ravaged Athens between 430 and 427 BC, killing Pericles, in 429 BC, along with thousands of other Athenians.5
In 424 BC he was appointed strategos (general), and given command of a squadron of seven ships, stationed at Thasos, probably because of his connections to the area. During the winter of 424/3 BC, the Spartan general Brasidas attacked Amphipolis, a half-day's sail west from Thasos on the Thracian coast. Eucles, the Athenian commander at Amphipolis, sent for assistance to Thucydides.6
Brasidas, aware of Thucydides' presence on Thasos and his influence with the people of Amphipolis and afraid of help arriving by sea, acted quickly to offer moderate terms to the Amphipolitans for their surrender, which they accepted. Thus when Thucydides arrived, Amphipolis was already under Spartan control7 (see Battle of Amphipolis).
Amphipolis was of considerable strategic importance, and news of its fall caused great consternation in Athens.8 Because of his failure to save Amphipolis, Thucydides says:
- It was also my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis; and being present with both parties, and more especially with the Peloponnesians by reason of my exile, I had leisure to observe affairs more closely.9
The remaining evidence for Thucydides' life comes from less reliable later ancient sources. According to Pausanias, someone named Oenobius was able to get a law passed allowing Thucydides to return to Athens, presumably sometime shortly after Athens' surrender and the end of the war in 404 BC.10 Pausanias goes on to say that Thucydides was murdered on his way back to Athens. Many doubt this account, seeing evidence to suggest he lived as late as 397 BC. Plutarch claims that his remains were returned to Athens and placed in Cimon's family vault.11
The abrupt end of his narrative, which breaks off in the middle of the year 411 BC, strongly suggests that he died while writing the book.
Education
Although there is no certain evidence to prove it, the rhetorical character of his narrative suggests that Thucydides was at least familiar with the teachings of the Sophists. These men were traveling lecturers, who frequented Athens and other Greek cities.It has also been asserted that Thucydides' strict focus on cause and effect, his fastidious devotion to observable phenomena to the exclusion of other factors and his austere prose style were influenced by the methods and thinking of early medical writers such as Hippocrates of Kos. Some have gone so far as to assert that Thucydides had some medical training.
Both of these theories are inferences from the perceived character of Thucydides' History. While neither can be categorically rejected, there is no firm evidence for either.
Character
His character was said to be dry and pessimistic. Occasionally throughout "The History of the Peloponnesian War" his sardonic sense of humor is hinted at, such as during the Athenian plague (Book II), when he remarks that some old Athenians seemed to remembered a rhyme that said with the Dorian War would come a "great death." Some claimed the rhyme was actually about a "great dearth," and was only remembered as "death" due to the current plague. Thucydides then remarks that, should another Dorian War come, this time attended with a great dearth, the rhyme will be remembered as "dearth," and any mention of "death" forgotten.Thucydides admired Pericles and approved of his power over the people, though he detested the more pandering demagogues who followed him. Thucydides did not approve of the radical democracy Pericles ushered in but thought that it was acceptable when in the hands of a good leader.
The History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides wrote only one book; its modern title is the History of the Peloponnesian War. All his legacy to history and historiography is contained in this one dense history of the twenty-seven year war between Athens and her allies and Sparta and her allies. The history breaks off near the end of the twenty-first year.
Thucydides is generally regarded as one of the first true historians. Unlike his predecessor Herodotus (often called "the father of history"), who included rumors and references to myths and the gods in his writing, Thucydides assiduously consulted written documents and interviewed participants in the events that he records. Certainly he held unconscious biases — for example, to modern eyes he seems to underestimate the importance of Persian intervention — but Thucydides was the first historian who seems to be attempting to be completely objective. By his discovery of [historic causation] he created the first scientific approach to history.
One major difference between Thucydides' history and modern historical writing is that Thucydides' history includes lengthy speeches which, as he himself states, were as best as could be remembered of what was said (or, perhaps, what he thought ought to have been said). These speeches are composed in a literary manner. Take, for example, Pericles' funeral speech, which includes an impassioned moral defense of democracy, heaping honor on the dead:
Although attributed to Pericles, this passage appears to have been written by Thucydides for deliberate contrast with the account of the plague in Athens which immediately follows it:
Classical scholar Jacqueline de Romilly first pointed out, just after the second world war, that one of Thucydides' central themes was the ethic of Athenian imperialism. Her analysis put his history in the context of Greek thought on the topic of international politics. Since her fundamental study, many scholars have studied the theme of power politics, i.e. real-politik, in Thucydides' history.
On the other hand, some authors, including Richard Ned Lebow, reject the common perception of Thucydides as a historian of naked real-politik. They argue that actors on the world stage who had read his work would all have been put on notice that someone would be scrutinizing their actions with a reporter's dispassion, rather than the mythmaker's and poet's compassion and thus consciously or unconsciously participating in the writing of it. His Melian dialogue is a lesson to reporters and to those who believe one's leaders are always acting with perfect integrity on the world stage. It can also be interpreted as evidence of the moral decay of Athens from the shining city on the hill Pericles described in the Funeral Oration to a power-mad tyrant over other cities.
Thucydides does not take the time to discuss the arts, literature or society in which the book is set and in which Thucydides himself grew up. Thucydides was writing about an event and not a period and as such took lengths not to discuss anything which he considered unrelated.
Leo Strauss, in his classic study The City and Man (see esp. pp. 230-31) argued that Thucydides had a deeply ambivalent understanding of Athenian democracy: on the one hand, "his wisdom was made possible" by the Periclean democracy, on account of its liberation of individual daring and enterprise and questioning; but this same liberation spurred the immoderation of limitless political ambition and thus imperialism, and eventually civic strife: this is the essence of the tragedy of Athens or of democracy—this is the tragic wisdom that Thucydides conveys, which he learned in a sense from Athenian democracy. More conventional scholars view him as recognizing and teaching the lesson that democracies do need leadership - and that leadership can be dangerous to democracy.12
In 1991 the BBC broadcast a new version of John Barton's 'The War that Never Ends', which had first been performed on stage in the 1960s. This adapts Thucydides' text, together with short sections from Plato's dialogues. More information about it can be found on the Internet Movies Data Base at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103235/
Quotes
- "But, the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it."13
- "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."14
- "It is a general rule of human nature that people despise those who treat them well, and look up to those who make no concessions."15
- "War takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men's characters to a level with their fortunes."16