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Thucydides

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and history books

   Bust of Thucydides residing in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.
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   Bust of Thucydides residing in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.

   Thucydides (circa 460 BC – c. 400 BC), Greek Θουκυδίδης, Thoukudídēs)
   was an ancient Greek historian, and the author of the History of the
   Peloponnesian War, which recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta
   and Athens to the year 411 BCE. This is widely considered the first
   work of scientific history, describing the human world as produced by
   men acting from ordinary motives, without the intervention of the gods.

Life

   Almost everything we know about the life of Thucydides comes from his
   own History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides' father was Olorus,^1
   a name connected with Thrace and Thracian royalty.^2 His daughter was
   believed to have been buried in the same area as Creon, a Thracian
   Prince or King. Another Thucydides was said to have lived before the
   one in question and was also linked with Thrace. He was a man of
   influence and wealth. He owned gold mines at Scapte Hyle, a district of
   Thrace on the Thracian coast opposite the island of Thasos.^3

   Thucydides, born in Alimos, was connected through family to the
   Athenian statesman and general Miltiades, and his son Cimon, leaders of
   the old aristocracy supplanted by the Radical Democrats. Thucydides
   lived between his two homes, in Athens and in Thrace. His family's
   connections brought him into contact with the very men who were shaping
   the history he wrote about.

   He was probably in his twenties when the Peloponnesian War began, in
   431 BC. He contracted the plague^4 that ravaged Athens between 430 and
   427 BC, killing Pericles, in 429 BC, along with thousands of other
   Athenians in which he later documented the symptoms when he
   recovered.^5

   In 424 BC he was appointed strategos (general), and given command of a
   squadron of seven ships, stationed at Thasos, probably because of his
   connections to the area. During the winter of 424-423 BC, the Spartan
   general Brasidas attacked Amphipolis, a half-day's sail west from
   Thasos on the Thracian coast. Eucles, the Athenian commander at
   Amphipolis, sent to Thucydides for help.^6

   Brasidas, aware of Thucydides' presence on Thasos and his influence
   with the people of Amphipolis and afraid of help arriving by sea, acted
   quickly to offer moderate terms to the Amphipolitans for their
   surrender, which they accepted. Thus when Thucydides arrived,
   Amphipolis was already under Spartan control^7 (see Battle of
   Amphipolis).

   Amphipolis was of considerable strategic importance, and news of its
   fall caused great consternation in Athens.^8 Because of his failure to
   save Amphipolis, Thucydides says:

          It was also my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty
          years after my command at Amphipolis; and being present with
          both parties, and more especially with the Peloponnesians by
          reason of my exile, I had leisure to observe affairs more
          closely.^9

   Using his status as an exile from Athens to travel freely among the
   Peloponnesian allies, he was able to view the war from the perspective
   of both sides. During this time, he conducted important research for
   his history.

   The remaining evidence for Thucydides' life comes from less-reliable
   later ancient sources. According to Pausanias, someone named Oenobius
   was able to get a law passed allowing Thucydides to return to Athens,
   presumably sometime shortly after Athens' surrender and the end of the
   war in 404 BC.^10 Pausanias goes on to say that Thucydides was murdered
   on his way back to Athens. Many doubt this account, seeing evidence to
   suggest he lived as late as 397 BC. Plutarch claims that his remains
   were returned to Athens and placed in Cimon's family vault.^11

   The abrupt end of his narrative, which breaks off in the middle of the
   year 411 BC, has traditionally been interpreted as indicating that he
   died while writing the book, though other explanations have been put
   forward.

Education

   Although there is no certain evidence to prove it, the rhetorical
   character of his narrative suggests that Thucydides was at least
   familiar with the teachings of the Sophists. These men were traveling
   lecturers, who frequented Athens and other Greek cities.

   It has also been asserted that Thucydides' strict focus on cause and
   effect, his fastidious devotion to observable phenomena to the
   exclusion of other factors and his austere prose style were influenced
   by the methods and thinking of early medical writers such as
   Hippocrates of Kos. Some have gone so far as to assert that Thucydides
   had some medical training.

   Both of these theories are inferences from the perceived character of
   Thucydides' History. While neither can be categorically rejected, there
   is no firm evidence for either.

Character

   Inferences about Thucydides' character can only be drawn (with due
   caution) from his book. Occasionally throughout "The History of the
   Peloponnesian War" his sardonic sense of humor is hinted at, such as
   during the Athenian plague (Book II), when he remarks that some old
   Athenians seemed to remember a rhyme that said with the Dorian War
   would come a "great death." Some claimed the rhyme was actually about a
   "great dearth" (limos), and was only remembered as "death" (loimos) due
   to the current plague. Thucydides then remarks that, should another
   Dorian War come, this time attended with a great dearth, the rhyme will
   be remembered as "dearth," and any mention of "death" forgotten.

   Thucydides admired Pericles and approved of his power over the people,
   though he detested the more pandering demagogues who followed him.
   Thucydides did not approve of the radical democracy Pericles ushered in
   but thought that it was acceptable when in the hands of a good leader.

   Although Thucydides has sometimes been misrepresented as a cold
   chronicler of events, strong passions occasionally break through in his
   writing, for example in his scathing appraisals of demagogues such as
   Cleon and Hyperbolus. And Thucydides was clearly moved by the suffering
   inherent in war, and concerned about the excesses to which human nature
   is apt to resort in such circumstances. For example, this is evident
   from his analysis of the atrocities committed during civil conflict on
   Corcyra in Book 3, Chapters 82-83, which includes the memorable phrase
   "War is a violent teacher".

The History of the Peloponnesian War

   Thucydides wrote only one book; its modern title is the History of the
   Peloponnesian War. (A more accurate title, in that it reflects the
   opening sentence of the work, would be "The War Between the
   Peloponnesians and Athenians".) All his legacy to history and
   historiography is contained in this one dense history of the 27-year
   war between Athens and its allies and Sparta and its allies. The
   history breaks off near the end of the 21st year.

   Thucydides is generally regarded as one of the first true historians.
   Unlike his predecessor Herodotus (often called "the father of
   history"), who included rumors and references to myths and the gods in
   his writing, Thucydides assiduously consulted written documents and
   interviewed participants in the events that he records. Certainly he
   held unconscious biases — for example, to modern eyes he seems to
   underestimate the importance of Persian intervention — but Thucydides
   was the first historian who seems to have attempted complete
   objectivity. By his acknowledgement of historic causation, he created
   the first scientific approach to history.

   One major difference between Thucydides' history and modern historical
   writing is that Thucydides' history includes lengthy speeches which, as
   he himself states, were as best as could be remembered of what was said
   (or, perhaps, what he thought ought to have been said). These speeches
   are composed in a literary manner. Take, for example, Pericles' funeral
   speech, which includes an impassioned moral defense of democracy,
   heaping honour on the dead:


   Thucydides

    The whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; they are honoured not
     only by columns and inscriptions in their own land, but in foreign
   nations on memorials graven not on stone but in the hearts and minds of
                                    men.


   Thucydides

   Although attributed to Pericles, this passage appears to have been
   written by Thucydides for deliberate contrast with the account of the
   plague in Athens which immediately follows it:


   Thucydides

     Though many lay unburied, birds and beasts would not touch them, or
      died after tasting them. ... The bodies of dying men lay one upon
   another, and half-dead creatures reeled about the streets and gathered
    round all the fountains in their longing for water. The sacred places
     also in which they had quartered themselves were full of corpses of
     persons that had died there, just as they were; for as the disaster
   passed all bounds, men, not knowing what was to become of them, became
     utterly careless of everything, whether sacred or profane. All the
     burial rites before in use were entirely upset, and they buried the
     bodies as best they could. Many from want of the proper appliances,
    through so many of their friends having died already, had recourse to
   the most shameless sepultures: sometimes getting the start of those who
    had raised a pile, they threw their own dead body upon the stranger's
    pyre and ignited it; sometimes they tossed the corpse which they were
      carrying on the top of another that was burning, and so went off.


   Thucydides

   Classical scholar Jacqueline de Romilly first pointed out, just after
   the second world war, that one of Thucydides' central themes was the
   ethic of Athenian imperialism. Her analysis put his history in the
   context of Greek thought on the topic of international politics. Since
   her fundamental study, many scholars have studied the theme of power
   politics, i.e. realpolitik, in Thucydides' history.

   On the other hand, some authors, including Richard Ned Lebow, reject
   the common perception of Thucydides as a historian of naked
   real-politik. They argue that actors on the world stage who had read
   his work would all have been put on notice that someone would be
   scrutinizing their actions with a reporter's dispassion, rather than
   the mythmaker's and poet's compassion and thus consciously or
   unconsciously participating in the writing of it. His Melian dialogue
   is a lesson to reporters and to those who believe one's leaders are
   always acting with perfect integrity on the world stage. It can also be
   interpreted as evidence of the moral decay of Athens from the shining
   city on the hill Pericles described in the Funeral Oration to a
   power-mad tyrant over other cities.

   Thucydides does not take the time to discuss the arts, literature or
   society in which the book is set and in which Thucydides himself grew
   up. Thucydides was writing about an event and not a period and as such
   took lengths not to discuss anything which he considered unrelated.

   Leo Strauss, in his classic study The City and Man (see esp. pp.
   230-31) argued that Thucydides had a deeply ambivalent understanding of
   Athenian democracy: on the one hand, "his wisdom was made possible" by
   the Periclean democracy, on account of its liberation of individual
   daring and enterprise and questioning; but this same liberation spurred
   the immoderation of limitless political ambition and thus imperialism,
   and eventually civic strife. This is the essence of the tragedy of
   Athens or of democracy -- this is the tragic wisdom that Thucydides
   conveys, which he learned in a sense from Athenian democracy. More
   conventional scholars view him as recognizing and teaching the lesson
   that democracies do need leadership -- and that leadership can be
   dangerous to democracy.^12

   In 1991, the BBC broadcast a new version of John Barton's 'The War that
   Never Ends', which had first been performed on stage in the 1960s. This
   adapts Thucydides' text, together with short sections from Plato's
   dialogues. More information about it can be found on the Internet Movie
   Data Base at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103235/.

Quotes

     * "But, the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of
       what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet
       notwithstanding, go out to meet it."^13
     * "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they
       must."^14
     * "It is a general rule of human nature that people despise those who
       treat them well, and look up to those who make no concessions."^15
     * "War takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a
       rough master, that brings most men's characters to a level with
       their fortunes."^16

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