Richard Claverhouse Jebb and John Malcolm Mitchell

“ It was in the vault of the Cimonian family at Athens, and near the remains of Cimon’s sister Elpinice, that Plutarch saw the grave of Thucydides. Thus the fortune of birth secured three signal advantages to the future historian: he was rich; he had two homes—one at Athens, the other in Thrace—no small aid to a comprehensive study of the conditions under which the Peloponnesian War was waged; and his family connexions were likely to bring him from his early years into personal intercourse with the men who were shaping the history of his time. ”

“ As a general rule, there is little attempt to mark different styles. The case of Pericles, whom Thucydides must have repeatedly heard, is probably an exception; the Thucydidean speeches of Pericles offer several examples of that bold imagery which Aristotle and Plutarch agree in ascribing to him, while the “Funeral Oration,” especially, has a certain majesty of rhythm, a certain union of impetuous movement with lofty grandeur, which the historian has given to no other speaker. ”

“ When Herodotus made his persons hold conversations or deliver speeches, he was following the precedent of epic poetry; his tone is usually colloquial rather than rhetorical; he is merely making thought and motive vivid in the way natural to a simple age. Thucydides is the real founder of the tradition by which historians were so long held to be warranted in introducing set speeches of their own composition. ”

“ Further, the contemporary readers of Thucydides were men habituated to a civic life in which public speech played an all-important part. Every adult citizen of a Greek democracy was a member of the assembly which debated and decided great issues. The law courts, the festivals, the drama, the market-place itself, ministered to the Greek love of animated description. ”

“ His hope was, as he says, that his History would be found profitable by “ those who desire an exact knowledge of the past as a key to the future, which in all probability will repeat or resemble the past. The work is meant to be a possession for ever, not the rhetorical triumph of an hour.” ”

“ The division of the war by summers and winters (κατά Θέρος καί χειμώυα) —the end of the winter being considered as the end of the year—is perhaps the only one which Thucydides himself used, for there is no indication that he made any division of the History into books. His “summer” Mode of Reckoning Time. includes spring and autumn and extends, generally speaking, from March or the beginning of April to the end of October. His “winter”—November to February inclusive—means practically the period during which military operations, by land and sea, are wholly or partly suspended. ”

“ Thucydides stands alone among the men of his own days, and has no superior of any age, in the width of mental grasp which could seize the general significance of particular events. The political education of mankind began in Greece, and in the time of Thucydides their political life was still young. ”

“ Homer had accustomed Greeks to look for two elements in any complete expression of human energy—first, an account of a man’s deeds, then an image of his mind in the report of his words. The Homeric heroes are exhibited both in action and in speech. ”

“ THUCYDIDES (Θουκυδίδης) , Athenian historian. Materials for his biography are scanty, and the facts are of interest chiefly as aids to the appreciation of his life’s labour, the History of the Peloponnesian War. The older view that he was probably born in or about 471 B.C., is based on a passage of Aulus Gellius, who says that in 431 Hellanicus “seems to have been” sixty-five years of age, Herodotus fifty-three and Thucydides forty (Noct. att. xv. 23) . ”

“ The historian's daughter is said to have saved the unfinished work and to have placed it in the hands of an editor. This editor, according to one account, was Xenophon, to whom Diogenes Laërtius (ii. 6, 13) assigns the credit of having “ brought the work into reputation, when he might have suppressed it.” The tradition is, however, very doubtful; it may have been suggested by a feeling that no one then living could more appropriately have discharged the office of literary executor than the writer who, in his Hellenica, continued the narrative. ”

“ Secondly, there were the Ionian prose writers whom he calls “chroniclers” (see Logographi) , whose general object was to diffuse a knowledge of legends preserved by oral tradition and of written documents—usually lists of officials or genealogies—preserved in public archives; and they published their materials as they found them, without criticism. ”

“ The value of her testimony is, however, negligible, and modern criticism inclines to a later date, about 460 [1] (see Busolt, Gr. Gesch. iii., pt. 2, p. 621) . Thucydides’ father Olorus, a citizen of Athens, belonged to a family which derived wealth and influence from the possession of gold-mines at Scaptē Hylē, on the Thracian coast opposite Thasos, and was a relative of his elder namesake, the Thracian prince, whose daughter Hegesipyle married the great Miltiades, so that Cimon, son of Miltiades, was possibly a connexion of Thucydides (see Busolt, ibid., p. 618) . ”