Thucydides wrote the story of the first democracy in history, and of the fortunes and fall of its empire, but his pages contain the modern world-scene in miniature. The tale is told by a great political thinker, whose penetrating insight and dramatic power caused Macaulay to call him the 'greatest historian that ever lived.' His work, slightly abridged, is here presented in translation with an introduction and notes.

Thucydides is an important author for any discussion of the possibilities for an ancient Greek democratic peace. Though democratic peace did not, in fact, seem to function in classical Greece, a number of passages in Thucydides show that an affinity did exist among democratic factions and city-states in the context of hostile competition between democratic and oligarchic regimes. Thucydides remarked on this competition and was aware of the inter-democratic affinities, but did not seem to think them salient (...) in city-state decisions of war and peace. The failure of democratic peace to develop may relate to the environment of the Greek city-state, which privileged local interests over broader constitutional ideals. (shrink)

Thucydides Historiae Vol. I: Books I-IV.

Thucydides, II. 28, records an eclipse of the sun in the summer of the first year of the Peloponnesian war. It can be no other than the annular eclipse of the 3rd of August, 431 B.C. He describes the phenomenon so accurately and with so many details that we can hardly doubt that he observed it himself — Tο δ' αủτο θέρονς γονμηνι κατά σελήγηγ, σπερ και μόγογ δοκει ειναι γιγνεσθαι δνγατόγ, ό λιος έξέλιπε μετά μεσημβριαγ και πάλιγ άγ (...) επληρθη, γενόμενος μηνοειδής και άστέρν τινν έκΦανέντων. (shrink)

This article uses Thucydides’ literary evidence to argue that elevated terrain was prevalent in the battles of the Peloponnesian War, contrary to the orthodox view of the Classical Greek battlefield. This argument has four parts. First, Thucydides’ battles are defined and listed. Second, the references to terrain in these battle accounts are catalogued. Third, this collated data is analysed to demonstrate that elevated terrain was indeed prevalent on the battlefields of the Peloponnesian War. And, fourth, some of the (...) military effects of this elevated terrain are explored. (shrink)

Thucydides is the author of the most harrowing account of societal breakdown in antiquity. Brian Leiter has recently made the provocative claim that Thucydides’ analysis of such breakdowns indicates that morality is of little import in guiding behavior, including legal behavior. Yet Thucydides also narrates events, particularly in Athens, that indicate that something resembling morality can continue to guide action, including legal action, even at the worst of times. Thucydides provides tantalizing clues as to why he (...) narrates events that only sometimes follow the path predicted by Leiter. In particular, Thucydides (accurately) portrays the law that suffuses Athenian life and saves Athens itself as, for the most part, informal and infused with moral concerns. Leiter's reading of Thucydides therefore not only is limited but misses implicit arguments that challenge Leiter's broader argument for a particular form of legal realism. (shrink)

Three basic assumptions distinguish Thucvdides' historical perspective from the perspective of the debate speeches in his history: he did not assume that events are continuous or repeatable, that human nature in unchangeable, and that the ultimate causes of human affairs are within human ken. In Thucydides' history, statesmen and citizens are judged by their capacities to do as Thucydides himself tried to do -judge novelty and greatness clearly. Lastingly effective good judgment unifies people because it stems from and (...) appeals to respect for the imponderables of human affairs, the unpredictability of the future and the fragility of human nature. Those who can appreciate novelties know that the future will not be lacking in them, as those who can appreciate greatness know that its causes are ultimately beyond analysis. Like Thucydides himself, such people are storytellers rather than moralists. (shrink)

The problem of the relationship between warmaking and the health of the city constitutes an important part of the Platonic corpus. In the Platonic dialogue Alcibiades I, considered in antiquity one of Plato's most important works, Socrates leads Alcibiades to agree that there ought to be a close link between justice and decisions about war. In light of this, Alcibiades’ actual advice to the city regarding the Peace of Nicias, as portrayed by Thucydides in History of the Peloponnesian War, (...) is put in stark relief within the dialogue. Plato's dialogue about Alcibiades can thus be seen as offering an alternative and morally critical account of how Alcibiades could have used his talents and rhetorical skills in addressing the city on the issue of war. More broadly, it reminds us of the difference between true statesmanship focused on the common good, and political or military rule engaged in for personal benefit or ambition. (shrink)

In this 2001 book Jonathan Price attempts to demonstrate that Thucydides consciously viewed and presented the Peloponnesian War in terms of a condition of civil strife - stasis, in Greek. Thucydides defines stasis as a set of symptoms indicating an internal disturbance in both individuals and states. This diagnostic method, in contrast to all other approaches in antiquity, allows an observer to identify stasis even when the combatants do not or cannot openly acknowledge the nature of their conflict. (...) The words and actions which Thucydides chooses for his narrative meet his criteria for stasis: the speeches in the History represent the breakdown of language and communication characteristic of internal conflict, and the zeal for victory led to acts of unusual brutality and cruelty, and overall disregard for genuinely Hellenic customs, codes of morality and civic loyalty. Viewing the Peloponnesian War as a destructive internal war had profound consequences for Thucydides' historical vision. (shrink)

Two problems involving Thucydides and medicine have attracted intense treatment by classical scholars and medical men working separately or in combination. They are, first, the nature of the Athenian Plague which Thucydides describes and, second, the possibility of his having been influenced by the doctrines and outlook of Hippocrates and his followers. It is the purpose of the present paper to reconsider both these problems, to indicate some false assumptions made in the methodology of previous attempts to identify (...) the Plague, and to suggest a somewhat radical revaluation of Thucydides' approach to medical matters compared with that of Hippocrates. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thucydides: Narrative and ExplanationCarolyn DewaldTim Rood. Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. xi + 339 pp. Cloth, £47.Any text has dislocations in its narrative surface. Since the time of Schwartz and Schadewaldt (1929), the text of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War has been scrutinized for its omissions, ellipses, and apparent contradictions. Scholars have thought that these would contain important clues regarding aspects (...) [End Page 138] of the war not emphasized explicitly by Thucydides in his narrative and that in addition they would help solve historiographical questions about Thucydides as an author: the nature and quality of the sources he had available to him, for instance, or, even more important, the evolution of his own understanding, over the long years in which he was observing and writing up the war. Thucydides himself provides grounds for such scholarly expectations by emphasizing that he had begun his project right at the war's beginning (1.1); he tells us in the second preface (5.26) that he was exiled after his command in the Thraceward region, and that thereafter he had a much better chance to talk to combatants on all sides. Clear stylistic differences distinguish different parts of the History; most strikingly, it breaks off mid-sentence in the narrative of the summer of 411. One can certainly see why, with this author in particular, attentive readers are tempted to take an analytical approach.Tim Rood, however, utterly rejects this temptation. Instead, he uses the tools of contemporary narratology to explore the text of Thucydides, just as it is, as the end product of authorial interpretation. He argues that Thucydides' narrative is not only written accurately to recount what happened but is also, in the most minute variations of its narrative details, an analysis of why and how the war happened as it did. Rood looks carefully at changes of perception (who "focalizes" the narrative at any given point), narrative disjunctions of time (analepsis, prolepsis, and variations in pacing), and Thucydides' handling of speech, thought, and the description of character. According to Rood, these are important clues that Thucydides provides to show us how the anticipations and perceptions of its various participants crucially shaped the Peloponnesian War.This is a careful, subtle book, and a very important one for historians as well as literary students of Thucydides. Rood is a student of S. Hornblower and C. Pelling, and in this revision of his Oxford thesis he cites the enormous secondary literature, both historical and historiographical, to excellent effect, usually in the context of precise observations about the import of individual passages. This is the first major study seriously to take into account Hornblower's Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 and 1996), and the result shows on almost every page. Even in the stretches where the minute attention to details of Thucydides' language make Rood's narrative itself read more like a commentary than an essay, the textual observations are aimed at a larger and more interesting interpretive point. In the thoughtfulness and integration of its readings of individual passages into a larger overall argument, it resembles Connor's Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), but where Connor uses a reader-response approach, arguing that Thucydides moves the reader in effect through the sequential experience of the war as it unfolds, Rood has Thucydides constructing his narrative to unpack for us as readers how the war's participants saw and thought about things and reacted to one another and how this in turn influenced how things unfolded.The book has twelve chapters, divided among five parts. The first part generally discusses temporal and focalizing strategies, concentrating on the Pylos story and the role speeches play in the narrative; the second emphasizes how [End Page 139] perception and gaps of knowledge between readers and characters as well as temporal displacement contribute to Thucydides' analysis of Peloponnesian and Athenian strengths and weaknesses in books 4 and 5. The third part explores how Athenian political life in general and the character of Nicias in particular become crucial in books 6 and 7 and shape the way the Sicilian Expedition unfolds, setting the stage for the grim years after... (shrink)

This article examines Thucydides’ treatment of the cause of the plague, its connection with the Spartans, and Apollo. Thucydides situates references to the plague in various contexts in the narrative, beginning with his account of the suprahuman catastrophes that occurred during the war (1.23) that are woven through the narrative in a seriatim argument that serves methodologically to demonstrate the possibility that Apollo brought the plague to Athens. His method clarifies the positioning of divine assistance in relation to (...) human causation, but it also leaves open the possibility of divine intervention in human history. (shrink)

In this book, Mary P. Nichols argues for the centrality of the idea of freedom in Thucydides' thought.

Thucydides and Aristophanes, austere historian and ribald comic playwright, lived in an Athens that had, since Themistocles, been moving from a regime of ancestral piety towards a secular empire. Thucydides suggests an agreement between his understanding and that of the pious Nicias — over and against this move. Aristophanes too is a vigorous proponent of peace, and the conclusions of many of his plays appear to suggest or encourage a conservative disposition towards ancestral piety or the rule of (...) ancestral, divine law.While these first impressions are not entirely misleading, a careful examination of the two thinkers’works, with attention to Nicias and the question of the gods, suggests a more complicated and revealing picture. Neither thinker is in agreement with Nicias, who proves to be representative of a fundamental human delusion. Each, however, sees that delusion as inescapable for political life, and so makes his appeal to more serious readers inconspicuously. (shrink)

Opposing the tendency to read Thucydides as a strong realist, committed to a theory of behaviour that assumes rationality as expected utility maximization, Ned Lebow and Clifford Orwin emphasize Thucydides’ attentiveness to deviations from rationality by individuals and states. This paper argues that Thucydides grasped the principles underlying contemporary prospect theory, which explains why people over-weight small probabilities and under-weight near certain ones. Thucydides offers salient examples of excessive risk-aversion in the face of probable gains and (...) excessive risk-seeking by decision-makers faced with high probability losses. Thucydides suggests that in a democracy, leaders’ rhetoric can limit or exacerbate the political effects of bias in risk assessment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thucydides and the Philosophic Origins of HistoryPaula DebnarDarien Shanske. Thucydides and the Philosophic Origins of History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xii + 268 pp. Cloth, $85.The overarching goal of this book is to "restore the wonder of Thucydides" (1), that is, to show how Thucydides constructs—or in the author's parlance, "founds"—a world so original and compelling that it lures readers of the (...) History into accepting it as their own. The metaphor Shanske borrows to explain the position of Thucydides' readers is Wittgenstein's fly in the inverted bottle: attracted by sweetness at the bottle's mouth, the fly enters, is trapped, and comes to think of the bottle as its entire world. The analogy, as Shanske observes, is not entirely apt. "Sweetness" is hardly Thucydides' bait, and unlike Wittgenstein's fly, readers of the History can retrace their steps and perceive how they were lured in the first place—presumably with the help of books like this one. And the trip into Thucydides' bottle turns out to be salutary, not fatal.In chapter 1, "Thucydides' Vision," Shanske identifies six features of the History that help to construct this bottle and attract readers. Thanks to its (1) density (amount of significant detail), (2) consistency (ideas encountered throughout the work in different contexts), (3) ubiquity (the relentless presentation of key ideas), and (4) open-endedness (puzzles posed; answers suggested, but not given), when readers reach the revolt of Chios in Book 8 (the episode with which Shanske opens his book), their (5) familiarity with Thucydides' vision allows them to understand the Chians' reasoning and its consequences. In this sense the narrative has (6) significance: the fate of the Chians matters.In the remainder of the chapter, keeping these six features in mind, Shanske revisits the beginning of Book 1 (1.1–23). I encountered stimulating insights throughout. His interpretation of axiologo\taton is astute, as is his claim that "the most revealing pretext (ale\thestate\ prophasis), though the one least manifest in logos," was the assumption that war was inevitable; because cities acted upon this assumption, they also brought about the war (39). "The prophasis," he concludes, "is a logos whose power stretches backward and forward in time; even more extraordinary, it is self-fulfilling even as it is dubious, and it is hidden, requiring patient rereading by the wise" (40). This backward and forward movement, Shanske contends, is characteristic of the History as a whole; in his analysis of the Archaeology he shows that by arguing both against and in terms of Homer, Thucydides links his work with his predecessors' (again, the History's familiarity) while radically breaking from them to "found" a new world (25–26). Thucydides' vision of his contemporary world, that is, also revises the past.Next, in "The Case of Pericles," Shanske exposes the view from within the [End Page 593] bottle. Here he develops the notion of "seeing" introduced in his first chapter. For Thucydides, clear vision is temporal and requires perceiving "kinds." Much as we are able to recognize the face of an old friend in a stranger (Shanske nods again to Wittgenstein), the History allows us to see the past in the present. This kind of seeing is both limited and open-ended: after we recognize the old friend we cannot unrecognize him; yet we can also see several connections at once. So, too, it requires training, precisely what Thucydides offers. Using Pericles as his test case, Shanske shows how Thucydides trains his readers to recognize "Pericles" in an array of figures that includes Cleon, Diodotus, Alcibiades, Hermocrates, Themistocles, and even Thucydides. In turn, readers learn to use Periclean "kinds" to reassess Pericles himself.Tragedy is central to Shanske's understanding of Thucydides. In chapter 3, by focusing on what is deinon (unfortunately translated as "dreadable"), which he identifies as a key notion in both the History and tragedy, Shanske tries to show that the History is both continuous with (again, familiarity) and goes further than tragedy. Although he associates deinon with transgression and excess, he also recognizes (pace Oudemans and Lardinois) that, as in Sophocles' "Ode to Man," its power is ambiguous: it builds... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thucydides 1.22.1: Content and Form in the SpeechesThomas F. GarrityThe interpretive problem posed by the speeches of Thucydides is one of the oldest chestnuts in classical scholarship. It has long been debated whether the historian claimed and/or attempted to present verbatim accounts of the arguments put forward by the speakers on each occasion as best he could, or whether he felt free to modify or to invent (...) particular arguments or even whole speeches. And the controversy has been fueled by what has been widely regarded as the ambiguity of the second of the two parts of Thucydides’ famous statement of aims and methods in 1.22.1,. I propose here, instead, that the language in which scholars have found confusion is actually a clear statement pertaining both to the content and to the form in which the speeches are presented by Thucydides.THE ASSUMPTION IN SCHOLARSHIPThe perceived ambiguity of 1.22.1 has baffled generations of scholars, as they have attempted to relate their understanding of Thucydides’ statement concerning the presentation of speeches to what they themselves perceive as the historian’s practice throughout the History. In general, the debate has been characterized by a concerted and ongoing attempt to control the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary in 1.22.1 as a necessary ingredient in the construction of interpretive arguments. This uncompromising insistence on a study based on a close examination of Thucydides’ Greek is most evident in the early German scholarship, conducted [End Page 361] primarily from the point of view of the problem of composition.1 In subsequent research, scholars begin to place less emphasis on the significance of the programmatic statement strictly in relation to the problem of composition, but they remain devoted to the idea that a correct understanding of the historian’s aims and methods derives from a precise understanding of the Greek in 1.22.1.2 For all the efforts, however, of such well–known students of Greek, scholars remain sharply divided over the precise meaning of Thucydides’ programmatic statement.Not all participants in the debate, however, have felt this obligation to deduce the precise meaning of the Greek contained in the historian’s programmatic statement. And it is perhaps a measure of despair over finding a solution to the perceived enigma in 1.22.1 that some scholars have found it possible, especially in more recent times, to construct elaborate theories about the historian’s presentation of speeches without providing a detailed analysis of Thucydides’ own statement of aims and methods. The accepted ambiguity of 1.22.1, moreover, has provided such scholars with what they consider to be primary evidence with which they might successfully call into question the “objectivity” of Thucydides as a “scientific historian,” and with which they might thereby persuasively promote the view of him as either an impassioned (outraged) moralist or a tendentious manipulator of his reader’s sympathies.3 [End Page 362]In particular, the traditional view that the dependent participial clause,, is a qualification, or refinement, of the main assertion,,..., is what has led to the assumption that Thucydides is making two separate statements limited to the aspect of the content of the speeches.4 The result of this assumption has been to accept the notion that ambiguity exists in 1.22.1, as no satisfactory analysis has been put forward to explain how Thucydides can at one and the same time be presenting—in terms of content—“what was appropriate” () and “what was really said” (). And some scholars, for whom it is not adequate simply to question the reliability of Thucydides as a historical source, have taken a more extreme step: seizing on the traditional acknowledgment of the difficulties present in 1.22.1, they argue that the dependent participial clause,, is not a qualification at all but rather actually an explicit contradiction of the main assertion,.5 Thucydidean scholarship, then, has presented itself with an ironic result: the inherited assumption in scholarship that both parts of 1.22.1 refer only to the content of the speeches, first developed and seemingly permanently entrenched by early readers of Greek—so many of whom were committed to defending... (shrink)

The nature of the Plague described by Thucydides in Book 2, chapter 49, has long been discussed both by medical and by classical scholars. Of numerous suggested identifications none has found general approval; and it is doubtful whether any opinion is more prevalent today than that the problem is insoluble. The classical scholar is handicapped by his ignorance of medical science; his medical colleague has often been led astray by translations deficient in exactitude if not disfigured by error. The (...) difficulties are great enough: but there is one indispensable preliminary task which can be undertaken with some prospect of success. If Thucydides' description is to be compared with modern records, it is necessary first to determine what the Greek words mean; and that can only be done by determining how far the Greek is expressed in the technical terms of contemporary medical science. It is obvious that Thucydides required a special vocabulary for this part of his work; and in fact over forty words in chapters 49 and 50 are unexampled elsewhere in his History, and a dozen more are used in meanings unexampled elsewhere. It is certain that a number of medical treatises were in circulation in Thucydides' lifetime, and that a more or less standard vocabulary had been or was being established. Now if it can be shown that the great majority of the terms employed by Thucydides in ch. 49 recur, apparently with the same meanings, as standard terms in the contemporary doctors, our second task—the comparison of Thucydides' description with modern records—will become a more rational undertaking than it was before, no longer the doubtful speculation which many of the modern doctors suppose it to be, thinking as they do that they have to deal with a layman's generalities expressed in literary language. (shrink)

The hypothesis that democracies rarely fight each other is well-supported for the contemporary era. Yet evidence for it in another era of many democracies—Greece in the fifth century BCE—is weak at best. This article considers several reasons why the experience of the two eras may differ. It shows that the causal reasoning of the contemporary democratic peace depends on key assumptions about how institutions constrain leaders that did not apply well in ancient polities. Analysis of these differences helps to clarify (...) theoretical understanding of interstate relations in both eras. (shrink)

The scholiast is clearly busy glossing a rare word. Here, as elsewhere in the scholia, Homer is cited for just that purpose. There is also an effective tendency to build judgements on a writer's style around the label ‘Oμηρικς. Curiously, in our case the scholiast seems to have hit upon the right reading of the passage. The detail about decaying timbers in the context of Nicias' letter could not help striking educated Greek readers, who, like Thucydides himself, had Homer (...) at their fingertips, as an echo of Agamemnon's words in Il. 2.135.1 argue that Thucydides intends the reminiscence to be perceived, and moreover, uses it to trigger off our understanding that the figure of Nicias should be read against that of the Homeric Agamemnon. (shrink)

This original book has been consistently cited by scholars of international relations who explore the roots of realism in Thucydides's history and the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. While acknowledging that neither thinker fits perfectly within the confines of international relations realism, Laurie M. Johnson proposes Hobbes's philosophy is more closely aligned with it than Thucydides's.

Thucydides and Aristophanes, austere historian and ribald comic playwright, lived in an Athens that had, since Themistocles, been moving from a regime of ancestral piety towards a secular empire. Thucydides suggests an agreement between his understanding and that of the pious Nicias — over and against this move. Aristophanes too is a vigorous proponent of peace, and the conclusions of many of his plays appear to suggest or encourage a conservative disposition towards ancestral piety or the rule of (...) ancestral, divine law.While these first impressions are not entirely misleading, a careful examination of the two thinkers’works, with attention to Nicias and the question of the gods, suggests a more complicated and revealing picture. Neither thinker is in agreement with Nicias, who proves to be representative of a fundamental human delusion. Each, however, sees that delusion as inescapable for political life, and so makes his appeal to more serious readers inconspicuously. (shrink)

Since the publication of our article on Thucydides and the Plague of Athens, Dr Heinrich von Staden of Yale University has kindly drawn our attention to a paper by Eby and Evjen suggesting that the Plague was glanders. We do not think that this diagnosis can possibly be correct, though there are undoubtedly some points in its favour. The authors have argued their case as persuasively as possible, and the proposal has sufficient merit to deserve a serious reply.

Is there or is there not a reference here to the Megarian Decree? Opinions have differed and no doubt will continue to do so. However, considerable authority has recently been thrown behind the proposition that the matter can be decided on purely linguistic grounds, that merely as a matter of use of Greek the passage cannot contain a reference to the Megarian Decree. This seems, on investigation, to be false, and since confusion appears to persist in the books about the (...) interpretation of Thucydides' text a short discussion may perhaps be of value. (shrink)

The excursus of Thucydides on the last years of Pausanias and Themistocles is remarkable for its simple, rapid-flowing style, its storytelling tone, its wealth of personal ancedote, its marked deviation from his normally strict criteria of relevance. These characteristics, which give the excursus a Herodotean flavour, have often been noted by modern scholars, but until recently acceptance of its general credibility has been widespread, and indeed, with one important exception, which seems to have created very little impression almost unchallenged.

This essay considers episodes in which phenomena like war and civil strife affected, changed, and revealed the identity of the polis. Even if framed by an understanding of the Peloponnesian War and the imperialistic logic and destiny of Athens, Thucydides' History still provides us with narratives that illuminate the particular history of “minor” poleis, each with its specific events, turning points, and dynamics. Through analysis of Thucydides' historical material, this essay focuses on Plataea, Corcyra, and Mytilene and discusses (...) the notion of the polis in relation to space and in the context of time, thereby testing Aristotle's question—too soon dismissed—about the separation of a community from the space of its city. (shrink)