Thucydides (c. 460 BCE - c. 395 BCE) was an Athenian historian and general, author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, which records the conflict between Athens and Sparta in the late fifth century BCE. [1] He excluded the gods and oracles from his explanations, insisted on eyewitness testimony and the critical examination of sources, and analysed political behaviour in terms of interest, fear and power. [2] He is regarded as a founder both of the discipline of history and of the realist tradition in the study of international relations.
Life
Thucydides was born in about 460 BCE in the Athenian deme of Halimous. [1] His father, Olorus, bore a Thracian royal name, and the family held rights to gold mines in Thrace, a connection that gave Thucydides both wealth and influence in the north Aegean.
He lived through the plague that struck Athens in 430 BCE, contracted the disease and recovered, and left a clinical description of its symptoms and of the collapse of social restraint that accompanied it. [2] In 424 BCE he was elected one of the ten generals of Athens and given command in the Thracian region. He failed to reach the city of Amphipolis in time to prevent its capture by the Spartan commander Brasidas, and was exiled from Athens for twenty years as a result.
Exile gave him freedom of movement and access to informants on both sides of the war, which he described as an advantage for his enquiry. [1] The circumstances of his death are unknown; his narrative breaks off in the middle of an account of the year 411 BCE, and he is generally thought to have died around 400 BCE, with the work unfinished.
The History of the Peloponnesian War
The History, divided by later editors into eight books, covers the war between the Athenian empire and the Peloponnesian League from 431 BCE onward. [3] Thucydides states at the outset that he wrote for those who wish to understand what happened and what, human nature being what it is, will happen again in similar form, and that he intended his work as a possession for all time rather than a performance for the moment.
He distinguished the immediate grievances that led to war from what he identified as its true cause, the growth of Athenian power and the fear this produced in Sparta. [2] He described his method: to record events only on the basis of the clearest available evidence, testing reports rather than accepting them, and to reconstruct speeches in the manner he judged appropriate to the occasion while keeping to the general sense of what was said.
Among the most studied passages are the funeral oration delivered by Pericles, which sets out an idealised account of Athenian democracy; the account of the plague; the description of civil war at Corcyra and the corruption of political language that accompanied it; the Melian Dialogue, in which Athenian envoys tell the people of Melos that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must; and the narrative of the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily. [4]
Legacy
Thucydides broke decisively with the approach of Herodotus by omitting myth, marvels and divine causation, and by restricting himself to contemporary events he could verify. [1] His work was continued by Xenophon and became a model for later Greek and Roman historians.
Read since the Renaissance as a manual of politics and war, the History has been central to the realist school of international relations, and its account of the rivalry between a rising and an established power has given rise to the modern phrase the Thucydides Trap. [3]
