The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War

by Thucydides

In some ways Herodotus is the most modern of historians, providing raw data and documentation without the intrusion of personal interpretation or explication.

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If Thucydides’ historical material is less rich and enchanting than The Persian Wars of Herodotus, his carefully chosen military episodes and political speeches by themselves explicitly reveal cause and effect (1.97.2), follow a discernible chronology (5.20.2–3), and often lead to more profound and general truths about human experience (3.82–84; 5.85–116). And perhaps most importantly, Thucydides suffered through a war (5.26.5) far more lengthy, brutal, and horrific than the allied Greeks’ noble defense of their country a half century earlier, an experience that must in some part account for his bleaker conclusions that human conflict was both uncontrollable and inevitable.

The two historians contrasted.

“Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places where it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals. Words had to change their ordinary meanings and to take those which were now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries” (3.82.3–5).

Prose sample.

At Book 1.21–22 Thucydides clearly outlined his own methods of historical inquiry, offering a self-conscious candor rare in ancient narrative writing. He did not trust first impressions, he says, not even his own. But through inquiry and cross-examination of witnesses (“tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible”), autopsy, and apparent inspection of written documents, Thucydides claims an objective inquiry that has “cost me some labor.” His later admission that his own exile allowed him time for careful investigation, “especially with the Peloponnesians” (5.26.5), suggests the image of a careful and nonpartisan note taker, eager to hunt down the principals themselves—both Athenian and Spartan—who took part in the war. His keen knowledge of Spartan custom and tradition (1.20.3; 4.80; 5.66.2–72.4) bears out this confident assertion. While it is once again fashionable to see this statement of principles at 1.21–22 as a clever smokescreen of sorts, a sham to hide biased fiction packaged as “objective history,” such modern cynicism rings mostly false for a variety of reasons. Although some of Thucydides’ narrative is highly stylized and focused deliberately on just a few individuals who best illustrate the author’s own ideas about fate, chance, and human experience, elsewhere he is clearly aiming to be accurate, objective, and comprehensive. Anonymous men are questioned (6.55.1), oracular pronouncements investigated (2.17.1; 2.54.2–5; 5.16), poets and prose authors b...

Methodology.

“With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.”

Hedging.

Succeeding generations of Greeks and Romans credited Thucydides with establishing objective history. His considerable skill in presenting that doctrine in formal prose left an undeniable mark even on his immediate literary successors, who likewise saw history as largely the unromantic story of political and military affairs. Indeed, many inquirers—Xenophon, Cratippus, and Theopompus—began their accounts where Thucydides had left off in 411. It is no surprise, then, that subsequent ancient historians were judged largely by the degree to which they followed the canons of accuracy and integrity established by Thucydides. Xenophon (428–354), therefore, is faulted for his failure to consult sources other than his own Spartan confidants, his blindness to the larger meaning of the very events he describes, and his view that his histories were not much more than one personal memoir. The fourth-century chronicler Ephorus (405–330), also unlike Thucydides, appears too credible and naive in his uses of sources, and lacks a workable chronology. Even the more erudite Theopompus (b. 378) is found too bitter in his judgments, without the distance and even the presumed air of objectivity of Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War. In contrast, the anonymous Oxyrhynchus Historian, the mostly lost Hieronymus of Cardia (d. 250), and the later and extant Polybius (200-c. 118) have often won praise as “Thucydidean” precisely because they are didactic and strive to teach the reader larger and more ...

Contrasting historians.

Thucydides suggests, I think, that the legacy of the Peloponnesian War would not be the victory of Spartan authoritarianism and the repudiation of the imperial democratic culture of Athens. No, it would be the irrevocable exhaustion and bankruptcy of the Greek city-state itself. The polis was, after all, an egalitarian but closed and static institution that could not adapt well to the military, economic, and political challenges of the wider Mediterranean world, changes initiated by the Persian invasion at the beginning of the fifth century, but dramatically and tragically elaborated by the virulent war between its most distinctive representatives, Athens and Sparta. And even if the Athenians are right about the universal relativity of justice and the amorality of power, we sense that such belief is nevertheless explicatory of their own destruction—and the demise of the polis itself. Our historian, it seems, does not necessarily like what he knows may be true.

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Yet to perceive a personally engaged and emotional Thucydides, with clear preferences in his selection of material, is not necessarily to dispense with the notion of objectivity.

An historian, remember, can (and should) be judgmental and opinionated, but he is not necessarily unfair or biased—if, as in the case of Thucydides, his evidence and method of inquiry are stated candidly for review and rebuttal.

Intention counts for little; action is everything.

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More curious is Thucydides’ very limited angle of vision.

In the final analysis, what stands out about Thucydides is not his weaknesses but his strengths as a historian. We note his omissions, but no account of the Peloponnesian War or of fifth-century Greece in general is more complete.

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At times Thucydides may be clearly mistaken in both detail and interpretation, but the extent of his accuracy and analysis astounds in a world where travel was difficult, written sources rarely available, and the physical obstacles to the writing of history substantial.

More.

The Peloponnesian War turns out to be no dry chronicle of abstract cause and effect. No, it is above all an intense, riveting, and timeless story of strong and weak men, of heroes and scoundrels and innocents too, all caught in the fateful circumstances of rebellion, plague, and war that always strip away the veneer of culture and show us for what we really are.

And so we begin.

Thucydides,1a 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.

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An illustration of this is furnished by the honor with which some of the inhabitants of the continent still regard a successful marauder, and by the question we find the old poets everywhere representing the people as asking of voyagers—“Are they pirates?”—as if those who are asked the question would have no idea of disclaiming the imputation, or their interrogators of reproaching them for it. [3] The same pillaging prevailed also on land.

Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirates life for meeeeee...