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INTRODUCTION
1 THUCYDIDES AND HIS HISTORY
1.1 Thucydides the Man
We know very little about "Thucydides the Athenian" (1.1) except for what he tells us in his text. He was probably born around 460–455 because he says that he lived through the whole Peloponnesian War "when I was at a time of life to comprehend and turned my attention towards it, in order to know with some exactness" (5.26.5). This comment suggests that he was old enough to make sound judgments even at the beginning of the war, in 431, and so suggests that he was a young man then (although it might just mean that he was still young enough to make sound judgments even twenty-seven years later at the end of the war in 404). Thucydides was probably born by 454 because he served as a general of Athens in 424 (4.104.4), and generals in Athens probably had to be at least thirty years of age. If he served as general in the first year in which he was eligible (which, however, we have no reason to assume), this would make him twenty-four at the outbreak of war.
When Thucydides reports his activities as general in Thrace (which he does in the third person, referring to himself as "Thucydides"), he tells us that his father, named Oloros, controlled the gold-mining rights in the part of Thrace near Thasos and therefore had influence with the leading men on the mainland there (4.104–5). From this we know that Thucydides was wealthy and probably linked to Thrace by family ties. Herodotus (6.41.2) reveals that Oloros was a Thracian royal name. Perhaps Thucydides's father was the son of a daughter of a Thracian king named Oloros. It is likely that Thucydides was chosen for his mission because of his influence in Thrace.
Marcellinus, the sixth-century A.D. author of the "Life" of Thucydides, notes that Thucydides was buried in the family plot of Kimon, and Herodotus reports that Kimon was the grandson of Oloros the king of Thrace — strongly suggesting a blood tie between Thucydides and Kimon (the tie is "almost certain" according to Wade-Gery in the OCD). The connection to Kimon and to Thracian royalty marks Thucydides out as an aristocrat and links him to one of the greatest families of Athens. Kimon's father, Miltiades, was the victor of Marathon (490), and Kimon himself was the victor over the Persians at the battle of Eurymedon that brought far-flung eastern places into the Athenian Empire (ca. 466). Kimon was also a proponent of both moderate democracy in Athens and alliance and friendship with Sparta. When his mission to Sparta to give aid to the helot revolt there was rudely rebuffed (probably in 462), Athens turned away from Sparta and moved toward more radical democracy (1.102). If Thucydides was related to Kimon, these events might have colored his politics.
During Thucydides's generalship in 424, he failed to prevent the capture of the important Athenian colony of Amphipolis by the Spartan general Brasidas (4.104–6; see below 3.5). Because of this, he was exiled from Athens. (In all likelihood, he did not return to Athens after his command and was exiled in absentia.) He was free to return only twenty years later under the treatythat ended the war and specified the return of exiles (Xenophon, Hellenika 2.2.20). Although we know from his so-called second preface (5.26.5) that he lived to see the end of the war, we do not know if he ever returned to Athens.
Thucydides's exile and consequent separation from public life will have given him the leisure time to write. Furthermore, his exile status allowed him to travel and interview people who would have been unavailable to him had he remained in Athens. As he says, "because I was present at the events of both sides, and not less at those of the Peloponnesians because of my exile, and being at leisure, I understood these all the more" (5.26.5). Thucydides refers to accuracy in this part of his second preface ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), and so "I understood these all the more" may simply mean "more accurately." It might also indicate that he came to better understand Peloponnesian attitudes. On the other hand, although his exile had benefits, Thucydides was no longer able to be present in Athens and so missed key events there. For example, he could not have been present in the assembly for the debate over the Sicilian expedition (6.8–26) and so was forced to write that up based solely on the accounts of informants. We do not know exactly where Thucydides spent his exile. Stroud (1994) makes a strong case that Thucydides's detailed knowledge of Korinth comes from visits there. He need not, however, have been long a "resident," as Stroud (1994, 302) claims.
Although Thucydides reports that he lived through the whole war "until the Lakedaimonians and their allies put an end to the empire of the Athenians and captured the long walls and the Peiraieus" (5.26.1), the text of his history breaks off in the middle of a sentence in the narrative of the summer of 411. Probably he died before he could finish his massive work; we have no idea how he died. If the Lichas son of Arkesilas whose death Thucydides mentions (8.84.5) is the same man attested as archon in Thasos in 398/97, that would show that Thucydides lived at least until that year, but "absolute identity is not certain" (Hornblower 3:995). Thucydides does not show knowledge of the revival of Athenian sea power in the fourth century, and most scholars think he lived only a few years into the new century.
We do not know how Thucydides's work came to be published. It is likely that he gave oral performances at symposia of sections of the work while he was writing it, but if he died before it was finished, presumably an editor published the whole. Xenophon's Hellenika picks up the narrative of the war where Thucydides leaves off. Theopompos and Kratippos also wrote fragmentary continuations.
1.2 Predecessors
Thucydides's immediate predecessor is Herodotus, who wrote a prose account of the Persian Wars. At least portions of this work seem to have been available in some form by 425 if (as it seems) Aristophanes parodies the beginning sections (1.1–5) in his Acharnians (515–29) of that year. The last dated events in Herodotus belong to 431 and 430, suggesting he had finished his text soon after that (cf. Stadter 2012, 42–43).
Thucydides seems to have been very familiar with Herodotus's whole work, since many sections of Thucydides's text make clear allusions to it. Thucydides also expects his readers to be familiar with Herodotus. As Simon Hornblower remarks (2:123), there are sections of Thucydides's work that "would be barely intelligible, or actually unintelligible, to a reader who did not know Herodotus very well." Thucydides's text is more focused than Herodotus's, however, and is less dependent on the geographic tradition of prose writing in which the land and interesting aspects of its flora, fauna, architecture, and people are a major focus. Thucydides's text, therefore, does not include many marvels, such as Herodotus's gold-mining "ants" (3.102), or folksy stories seemingly told for their own sake. Because of this, Thucydides writes that his work may "seem less pleasurable for hearing" because of "the absence of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]" (1.22.4). What it will include, however, is "the truth about the past" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]). Unlike past "prose writers," who "composed more to be attractive to the ear than to be true," Thucydides offers accuracy based on "the clearest possible evidence" (1.21.1).
1.3 Methodology
In a paragraph on his methodology (1.22), Thucydides divides his subject matter into "what was said both before and during the war" and "the actions of the war." He reveals that he was present at some of the speeches he reports, but for others (those in Athens after his exile, for example), he relied on unnamed informants (1.22.1). He says about the actions of the war that "I considered it my responsibility to write neither as I learned from the chance informant nor according to my own opinion, but after examining what I witnessed myself and what I learned from others, with the utmost possible accuracy in each case" (1.22.2; trans. Lattimore). Doing this required "great effort, because eyewitnesses did not report the same specific events in the same way, but according to individual partisanship or ability to remember" (1.22.3; trans. Lattimore).
Thucydides, that is, has worked hard to gather and sift evidence, to evaluate it and his informants carefully, and to judge between rival accounts. He almost never demonstrates this process to his readers, however. He offers us the results of his hard work but almost never presents competing accounts or explanations for why he thinks one version more likely than the other. It is hard, therefore, to disagree with Thucydides's interpretation of things. He rarely offers his own opinion overtly, in the first person, in a "narrator intervention." For this reason, his history can appear supremely "objective," a "just the facts" approach. But as Thomas Hobbes (1962, xxii, who published a translation of Thucydides in 1629) noted long ago, "the narration itself doth secretly instruct the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept."
1.4 Speeches
Like Herodotus and Homer before him, Thucydides gives to the characters in his work speeches in direct and indirect discourse. Of these speeches, Thucydides writes that "it was hard to recall the exact words of what was said" both for him and for his informants. He therefore composed the speeches "in the way I thought each would have said what was especially required in the given situation ... with the closest possible fidelity on my part to the overall sense of what was actually said" (1.22.1; trans. Lattimore adapted). It is hard to reconcile the two main claims in these lines.
On the one hand, Thucydides is clearly composing the speeches himself according to rhetorical necessity (see Macleod 1983, 52) and his own idea of what a particular individual at a particular time in front of a particular audience must have said. The speeches represent what Jonathan Price (2013, 436) describes as "the psychological make-up and ideological outlook of each speaker in his particular circumstances (as Thucydides understood them)." On the other hand, Thucydides claims to know the "overall sense of what was actually said" for each speech and to have kept as close as possible to it when composing ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]). The second part of the sentence seems to preclude the argument that Thucydides sometimes simply made speeches up entirely out of whole cloth. The first part of the sentence, however, seems to refute the argument that Thucydides had written notes of the speeches he presents (as Munn 2000, 306 has proposed).
His practice was probably somewhere in the middle, and different for different speeches. We should feel more confident about Thucydides's account of a speech he heard himself than of one he knows about only at second or third hand (but he does not tell us which ones are which; we have to figure that out for ourselves, to the extent that we can). Furthermore, his presentation is probably more accurate for speeches that would have made a powerful impression on those who heard them — like Perikles's Funeral Oration — and that had a large audience, for the simple reason that these factors would produce many good sources. One feels less confident, however, about speeches like the Melian Dialogue (5.85–112, where Thucydides's only likely sources were the few unnamed Athenian speakers because most of the Melians were killed); or the speech of the Plataians upon their surrender (3.53–59, where the only possible sources were the Theban speakers and the few Spartan judges because all the Plataians were killed); or the various prebattle exhortations in Sicily (where the only possible sources were the survivors of the battles). Did Thucydides really seek out these people or those who had spoken to them? If he did, and was able to do so quickly, he might have gotten a reasonably accurate account, at least for parts of some speeches. Thucydides never tells us who his sources were, but if we are to believe what he says in 1.22 about his quest for [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], he would have sought out the best informants he could find for every speech in his work.
1.5 The "Composition Question"
Passages of Thucydides's text echo and evoke other passages in his work, so that it is impossible to proceed through the narrative without being repeatedly reminded of earlier passages and thereby invited to confirm or revise judgments those earlier passages had suggested. As Friedrich Nietzsche (1998, 77) says, Thucydides "needs to be turned over line by line and his hidden thoughts read as clearly as his words: there are few poets so rich in hidden thoughts." Reading Thucydides requires reading "slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft," looking for echoes and resonances, "dramatic juxtapositions," internal allusions, and ironic commentary. Such a reading assumes that although he did not finish it, Thucydides had carefully revised much, if not most, of his work after the war to represent the events of the whole war and the judgments he had reached at its conclusion, and that the text is, therefore, a unity.
Through at least the midpoint of the twentieth century, however, Thucydidean scholars spilled much ink on the "composition question," which hoped to discover when different sections of the text were written. Even the authors of the last volume of the magisterial Historical Commentary on Thucydides (HCT) from 1981 did not consider the text as an artistic unity and in multiple places labored to determine whether individual sections or passages were written early or late in Thucydides's long period of writing. The determination of the time of composition of a passage seemed especially important for Thucydides's text because it is unfinished, and so one can never know that a given passage represents Thucydides's final thoughts on a matter that would have survived Thucydides's final revision. With the publication of Robert Conner's book on Thucydides in 1984, however, this approach to Thucydides fell out of fashion, and scholars today generally recognize the "tightness of texture" of the work (J. Finley 1967, xii). For example, neither Brill's 2006 Companion to Thucydides nor the 2017 Oxford Handbook address the composition question. In any case, Thucydides's narrative about the Sicilian expedition in books 6 and 7 has always been recognized as one of the most highly polished sections of the work. Nevertheless, the composition question does relate to our understanding of Thucydides's ultimate judgment on the Sicilian expedition (2.65.10–13; see appendix).
1.6 Thucydides's Dating System
Thucydides's year is divided into two unequal parts — [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], or "summer," and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], or "winter." This is probably because Thucydides wanted to indicate "the military conditions" of given events (i.e., was it stormy, was there water in the riverbeds, etc.; see Gomme in HCT 2:389). [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] (which also includes both our "spring" and "fall") normally runs from about early to mid-March until the end of October; [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] runs from early November to the following spring. Because there was no common Greek calendar, Thucydides uses seasons rather than the calendar of any given city to make his account more generally accessible. Philip Stadter notes that Herodotus uses the seasons as dating markers for the two years of Xerxes's expedition (2012, 44). Thucydides, Stadter (45) goes on, took over Herodotus's procedure but made the notices "formal and regular, establishing an unmistakably clear chronological framework." Thucydides thus marks the beginning and end of the seasons and formally marks the end of each year of the war. Because Thucydides's new year begins with the beginning of his "summer" and runs until the end of the following "winter," his year spans portions of two of our years. For example, we must call his sixteenth year of the war (the year in which the Athenians turned to Sicily) "416/415 B.C." because it runs from March 416 to February 415. (See HCT 4:18–23; HCT 3, appendix; and HCT 5:147–49 for Thucydides's dating system.)
2 THUCYDIDES'S LANGUAGE AND STYLE
2.1 Difficulty
Thucydides is hard. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a literary critic of the Augustan period, warns that "easily counted are the few who are capable of understanding the whole of Thucydides, and not even these can understand some without recourse to a grammatical commentary" (On Thucydides 51; trans. Pritchett). Marcellinus claims that "his obscurity is deliberate; he did not wish to be accessible to all or to cheapen himself by being easily understood by all and sundry" (Russell 1981, 197–98). The most recent scholarly commentator on Thucydides, Simon Hornblower, argues that at least some of Thucydides's obscurity is deliberate ambiguity — or "polyinterpretability" — especially about controversial and potentially dangerous political questions (see his commentary on 8.97.2 at Hornblower 3:1036; see also commentary on 6.86.2 and 7.86.5 at Hornblower 3:505—6 and 741). (Continues…)
Excerpted from "Thucydides's Melian Dialogue and Sicilian Expedition"
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