Thucydides

“ Thucydides is one of the most accurate and impartial of historians. He was filled with an abiding love for Athens, but, unlike some Athenians, he felt no bitterness towards her for exiling him. The only remark he makes about his banishment is that it gave him the opportunity to write his history. He was scrupulously fair to both sides, and he tells us himself of the care he took to be accurate and to accept nothing on the evidence of mere tradition.
Men do not discriminate, [he said] , and are too ready to receive ancient traditions about their own as well as about other countries ”

“ The punishment was severe, but Thucydides was not idle during his banishment. He travelled from place to place, and everywhere he went he paid great attention to the ways of the people and to the manner in which their cities were governed. He himself wrote, ‘Associating with both sides, with the Peloponnesians quite as much as with229 the Athenians, because of my exile, I was thus enabled to watch quietly the course of events.’
After having studied the ‘course of events,’ Thucydides began to write about the Peloponnesian war, and he became the greatest of all the historians of Greece. ”

“ In the pages of Herodotus we live again, as we live nowhere else, through all the excitement and thrill of the days when Greece fought the Barbarian and drove him out of the land.
The greatest of the Greek historians was Thucydides, great not only among the Greek writers, but among the historians of the world. He was born about 471 B.C., and he wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides was an Athenian, a man of wealth and good position, and was one of the few who had the plague and recovered from it. ”

“ When Thucydides gave in full the speeches made by Cleon and Diodotus, he was helping his reader, the average citizen of a Greek republic, to do on more accurate lines that which the reader would otherwise have tried to do for himself. Thucydides was writing for men who knew Greek politics from within, and he knew that, if they were to follow him with satisfied attention, he must place them at their accustomed point of view. The literary influences of the age set in the same direction. At the beginning of the war the Attic drama had been in vigour for more than forty years. ”

“ There is, however, this difference between the brevity of Sallust and that of his supposed model, Thucydides. That of the Greek historian was natural and involuntary; that of the Roman intentional and the result of imitation. Thucydides thought more quickly than he could write: his closely-packed ideas and condensed constructions, therefore, constitute a species of shorthand, by which alone he could keep pace with the rapidity of his intellect. He is, therefore, always vigorous and suggestive ”

“ This is an insufficient excuse, but it is better than anything which can be offered on behalf of Thucydidês; who had with him a paid Athenian force, and might just as well have kept it at Eion as at Thasos. We may be sure that the absence of Thucydidês with his fleet, at Thasos, was one essential condition in the plot laid by Brasidas with the Argilians.
To say, with Dr. Thirlwall, that “human prudence and activity could not have accomplished more than Thucydidês did, under the same circumstances,” is true as matter of fact, and creditable as far as it goes. ”

“ The ideas of Thucydides about the qualities of a democracy, as in Athens, were congenial to Hobbes, [Pg 319] while the task of rendering into idiomatic English a writer so condensed as Thucydides, combined with study of the other classics, and practice in Latin prose composition, made up for the indolence of his youth. In 1631 he became tutor to the new young Earl of Devonshire, and gave him an admirable education, including law, astronomy, logic, rhetoric and the "opinions of a good Christian". ”

“ It was from them, rather than from Herodotus, Thucydides or Xenophon that the Roman world obtained its knowledge of the history of Greece in the past, and its conception of its significance. Both were pupils of Isocrates, and both, therefore, bred up in an atmosphere of rhetoric. Hence their popularity and their influence. The scientific spirit of Thucydides was alien to the temper of the 4th century, and hardly more congenial to the age of Cicero or Tacitus. To the rhetorical spirit, which is common to both, each added defects peculiar to himself. ”

“ A saying of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, stands on record, spoken by him by way of pleasantry upon Pericles's dexterity. Thucydides was one of the noble and distinguished citizens, and had been his greatest opponent; and, when Archidamus, the king of the Lacedaemonians, asked him whether he or Pericles were the better wrestler, he made this answer: "When I," said he, "have thrown him and given him a fair fall, he by persisting that he had no fall, gets the better of me, and makes the bystanders, in spite of their own eyes, believe him." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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) . ”

“ He is vigorous and intense, and every word he uses has a meaning, but some of his sentences are not always easily understood. One of the greatest tributes which can be paid to him is the estimate of an able critic, George Long, that we have a more exact history of a protracted and eventful period by Thucydides than we have of any period in modern history equally extended and eventful ”

“ It is the character of Alcibiades, as Thucydides saw its salient points, condensed in a dramatic form; but it is not such a speech as Alcibiades could conceivably have made on this occasion, or indeed on any. Thucydides has given us distinct portraits of the chief actors in the Peloponnesian war, but these portraits are to be found in the clearly narrated actions of the men; the words ascribed to them rarely do more than mark the stronger lines of character; they seldom reveal new traits of a subtler kind. ”

“ It is certain that he was a most diligent student of Thucydides, whose great history he is said to have known by heart. More than sixty of his orations have been preserved. "Of all human productions they present to us the models which approach the nearest to perfection." ”

“ I shall let Macaulay furnish the warrant for a close study of Thucydides. “This day,” Macaulay said, when in his thirty-fifth year, “I finished Thucydides after reading him with inexpressible interest and admiration. He is the greatest historian that ever lived.” Again during the same year he wrote: “What are all the Roman historians to the great Athenian? I do assure you there is no prose composition in the world, not even the oration on the Crown, which I place so high as the seventh book of Thucydides. It is the ne plus ultra of human art. ”

“ Probably the Athenian war-party would indignantly have repudiated the reasoning put into the mouths of their leaders. After all they were a democracy; and, as Thucydides fully recognizes, a great mass of men, if it does commit infamies, likes first to be drugged and stimulated with lies: it seldom, like the wicked man in Aristotle's Ethics, "calmly sins." But in any case the massacre of Melos produced on the minds of men like Thucydides and Euripides—and we might probably add almost all the great writers who were anywise touched by the philosophic spirit—this peculiar impression. ”

“ Thucydides, indeed, gives a plain statement of the greatness of his power; and the comic poets, in their spiteful manner, more than hint at it, styling his companions and friends the new Pisistratidae, and calling on him to abjure any intention of usurpation, as one whose eminence was too great to be any longer proportionable to and compatible with a democracy or popular government. And Teleclides says the Athenians had surrendered up to him — The tribute of the cities, and with them, the cities too, to do with them as he pleases, and undo; To build up, if he likes, stone walls around a town ”

“ Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. ”

“ So far as the language of the speeches is concerned, then, Thucydides plainly avows that it is mainly or wholly his own. 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. ”

“ If then we look down the three centuries and a half which elapsed between the commencement of the Olympic æra and the age of Herodotus and Thucydidês, we shall discern a striking advance in the Greeks,—ethical, social and intellectual. Positive history and chronology has not only been created, but in the case of Thucydidês, the qualities necessary to the historiographer, in their application to recent events, have been developed with a degree of perfection never since surpassed. Men’s minds have assumed a gentler as well as a juster cast ”

“ So independent were these citadel-communities that, Thucydides tells us, on one occasion Eleusis under Eumolpos actually made war on Athens under Erechtheus.
So things went on till the reign of Theseus and his famous Synoikismos, the Dwelling-together or Unification. Theseus, Thucydides says, was a man of ideas and of the force of character necessary to carry them out. He substituted the one for the many; he put an end to the little local councils and council-houses and centralized the government of Attica in Athens. Where the government is, thither naturally population will flock. ”

“ VIII. Accusations against public men, when unsuccessful, are the fairest stepping-stones in their career. Thucydides failed against Pericles. The death of Tolmides—the defeat of Coronea—the slaughter of the Hoplites—weakened the aristocratic party; the democracy and the democratic administration seized the occasion for a decisive effort. Thucydides was summoned to the ostracism, and his banishment freed Pericles from his only rival for the supreme administration of the Athenian empire. ”

“ This was the very school in which men were likely to acquire the dissimulation of Mazarin, the judicious temerity of Richelieu, the penetration, the exquisite tact, the almost instinctive presentiment of approaching events which gave so much authority to the counsel of Shaftesbury that “it was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God.” In this school Thucydides studied; and his wisdom is that which such a school would naturally afford. He judges better of circumstances than of principles. The more a question is narrowed, the better he reasons upon it. ”

“ It appears to me that nothing can be more incorrect or inconsistent with the whole tenor of the narrative of Thucydidês, than to charge the Athenians with having starved their expedition. What they are really chargeable with, is, the having devoted to it a disproportionate fraction of their entire strength, perfectly enormous and ruinous. And so Thucydidês plainly conceives it, when he is describing both the armament of Nikias and that of Demosthenês. ”

“ It is the authority of Thucydides which has imposed upon the learned an artificial chronology. The scholar is often wanting in acuteness. There are, I suppose, plenty of philologers who believe Thucydides far more implicitly than their Bible, and because he appears careful and trustworthy in contemporary affairs, actually assume that he must be equally credible in matters wholly beyond his ken. I suppose they imagine, though they do not state it, that the historian consulted State archives in Sicily, and set down his conclusions from a careful analysis of their evidence. ”

“ In the history of Thucydides, so far as it forms a connected series of events, four times only during a period of nearly seventy years does a woman cross the scene. In each instance her apparition only lasts for a moment. In three of the four instances she is a queen or a princess, and belongs either to the half-barbarous kingdoms of northern Hellas or to wholly barbarous Thrace. ”

“ Like Josephus, Thucydides combined the duties of general and historian of the great war; like him he failed as a military commander (IV. 104 ff.) , and through his consequent exile was enabled to associate with the enemy and to view the war from the standpoint of both belligerents (V. 26) . [37] However that may be (and it is to the credit of our author that he does not suggest the comparison) , there is a marked imitation of the style of Thucydides in portions of the Antiquities, especially in Books XVII-XIX, which possess peculiarities of their own. ”