Thucydides of Athens (c. 455-400 BC) was an Athenian aristocrat of supreme intelligence and a failed politician who took advantage of his 20 years of political exile to become the most acute analyst and historian of the great athenaeum. -Peloponnesian War 431-404. Thucydides was born into the world’s first democratic political state, but he had no sympathy for majority rule, the masses, except when they themselves were controlled and did what a superior advised. statesman of the singular caliber of Pericles (c. 493-429).
Thucydides survived the end of that war, which was ultimately a major defeat for his own hometown by the Spartans financially aided by their old enemy, the Persians. but he did not live long enough to complete his story, which stops mid-sentence in what we call the summer of 411 BC. c., what he called the 20th summer of “his” war. I say this because Thucydides’ opinion that there was only one war, interrupted by a period of false peace, was not shared by all his contemporaries. one of the reasons i wanted it to be a single 27 year conflict was that it made it so much longer than not only herodotus’s wars (only 2 years, 480 and 479), but also the trojan war of 10 years of homer! much longer and therefore much more memorable, much more demanding for a historian of the quality and stature of him. Thucydides was just agonizing, competitive, a very Greek character trait.
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but he was much more than a narrative and descriptive historian. rather, he viewed his war as a kind of laboratory sample to be dissected and analyzed to bring to light the constants of human behavior, not so much personal as collective: what was it that made states behave towards each other in the same way? the way they do? he did, especially in terms of peace and war. he seems to have thought that there were three main motivations: fear (in the security sense, that is), financial advantage, and self-esteem or “honor”. more like a playwright, he composed speeches that he put into the mouths of the main actors at key moments of decision. Being a historian, concerned primarily with historical accuracy, he was careful to assert that he not only made these speeches off the top of his head, but that he did so on the basis of primary reports from reliable eyewitnesses to whom he was able. have access. also, of course, as his own experience of the speeches he himself had heard, for example some of the master orator pericles.
Pericles died, as did many thousands of Athenians, of some devastating plague, probably typhus or typhoid fever. Thucydides also caught the plague, but lived to describe the symptoms of it, in hideously graphic detail. But for Thucydides Pericles’ death had a much broader meaning, as a key part of his explanation of why, 25 years later, the Athenians lost the war. This was, he believed, because after the death of Pericles, the Athenians no longer possessed such a great leader and were persuaded by inferior and selfish democratic politicians (“demagogues”) to abandon established strategy and policy altogether. with such wisdom and foresight. pericles. in reality, things were not so black and white, and Thucydides is guilty of being somewhat blinded by his excessive admiration for his fellow aristocrat and by his class prejudice both against democracy as such and against class politicians. short.
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luckily for us, thucydides lived long enough to write in detail the civil war the athenians sadly fell into in 411 after their disastrous attempt to extend the scope of the war to sicily and conquer (democratic) syracuse, a ally of sparta In this way, he was able to supplement his earlier excoriating analysis of another Greek civil war, the one that ravaged the island-state of Corfu in 427. For Thucydides, as well as being a brilliant historian, was also a rather exceptional political theorist and analyst. even philosopher. Consider, for example, the so-called ‘Melian dialogue’: set in the winter of 416/5 at a crucial moment in the entire war, the dialogue, entirely invented by Thucydides, pits the oligarchic rulers of the small Cycladic island against each other – state of melos against representatives of the greatest naval power in the aegean sea at the time, the democratic athens, in a debate on power and force. for the Melians it was a matter of life and death; in reality, the Athenians completely destroyed the Melian state, killing the men and selling the women and children into slavery abroad. but what Thucydides is interested in, and what he thinks should be of interest to us (since his work as a whole is, according to him, “a possession forever”), is what factors motivate a large state in its power relations with a small one, and what is the best way to make that happen. pragmatically, differential power must be exercised. Thucydides clearly believed that the Athenians had been quite wrong. After the episode of Melia, the path to the Athenian defeat was traced.
Translating the Athenian Greek of Thucydides into English is notoriously difficult. one of the most widely used translations, now rather outdated, is that of richard crawley, which has been usefully reproduced as the core text of the landmark thucydides, subtitled a complete guide to the peloponnesian war , ed. r. Strassler The Strassler edition comes equipped with all kinds of aids, including a host of maps, footnotes, and appendices on various aspects of both Thucydides’ work and the Greek world he wrote about. but for me the best translation on the market, because the most faithful to thucydides’ often twisted greek, is jeremy mynott’s, made not for a history series but for texts in the history of political thought of cambridge university press. series i> (2013). note the title mynott gives: not History of the Peloponnesian War, but The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians – clumsier, less abrupt, but (would have charmed Thucydides himself) more precise.
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