The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War

by Thucydides

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.