Thucydides

• The man
• Wealthy aristocrat of Athens
• Lived 460-400 
• Was a general, but in 424, he failed to relieve Amphipolis and so was exiled because of that failure 
• The Work: The Peloponnesian War 
• He covers 431-411 (the war itself lasted until 404, Xenophon finished the history) 
• procedure: research, comparison of accounts, official documents, personal observation 
• Time frame and narrative structure is annalistic: Summer and Winter of each year are reported in succession
• This framework is fairly rigid: Thucydides chugs through each year reporting the events
  
• Speeches punctuate particularly important events
• These speeches are not verbatim
• But they are not likely to be entirely fictitious
• They are what Thucydides thought should have been said
• He was the first scientific historian 
• He is impartial, but has opinions
  
• He presents speeches that are diametrically opposed and does not say which side he favors
• Nonetheless one forms a clear opinion as to Thucydides' own opinions  (see the third Woodruff quotation below).
• He explicitly approves of Pericles
• He explicitly approves of the character of the Athenians as opposed to the Spartans
• But for the most part, he does not declare his own opinions
  
• Religion does not enter into his opinions or much into his work at all: women do not play any significant role (compare Herodotus)
• His subject is power politics
  
• A representative instance:
  
• In Athens' attempt to take over Melos, the first thing the Athenians do in the negotiations, according to Thucydides' report, is to exclude any considerations of right or wrong from discussion.
• Next, they appeal to the Melians' self-interest: submit now on good terms, or later on bad terms.
• Melians won't budge.
• Athens commences hostilities, prevails, and puts the military-aged males to death and enslaves the women and children.
• He has no concern to entertain/tell stories: he wants to provide a useful work for future thinkers and an enlightening view of human nature
• A passage where Thucydides' analyzes stasis: III.82-3
  
• He seems to think that Athens lost the war more than Sparta won it: the Athenians' strengths proved their undoing (ambition, energy, and flexibility)
  
• Quick Quotations that capture aspects of Thucydides well:
• Meyer Reinhold has said about Thucydides: 
• "[Thucydides thinks that] individuals, classes, states act not in accordance with laws, customs, ideals, principles, or divine influence, but by self-interest and advantage, by what benefits them and is expedient." 
• "[He also thinks that] human nature is uniform, and behavior is motivated by circumstances; men will behave the same way under the same conditions." 
• Paul Woodruff says
  
• "Like Plato he finds demagoguery antithetical to any serious thought about justice. Like Plato and Aristotle he is distrustful of out-and-out democracy, and like Aristotle, he seems to favor a mixed constitution. He is far beyond any ancient thinker, in his understanding of the ways of power in the real world. His work calls for comparison with that of Machiavelli or Hobbes, but he rarely instructs us as they do. Hobbes put it best: 'Digressions for instruction's cause, and other such open conveyances of precepts (which is the philosopher's part), he never useth; as having so clearly set before men's eyes the ways and events of good and evil counsels, that the narration itself doth secretly instruct the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept.'" (Woodruff, P X, Hobbes' intro to his Thuc. translation) 
• Woodruff talks of Thucydides' discussion of "the necessity that falls on those who try to manage an empire: empires cannot remain stagnant; they must grow, and the managers of empires must pursue growth and keep order with a businesslike disregard for the moral principles they would otherwise hold dear. The tragic center of Thucydides' tale is a city that found itself compelled to wage an atrocious war, with dismal consequences for itself and its allies." (Woodruff, XI) 
• Woodruff further says (XIX): "Like many literary texts, the History seems to do more to hide than to reveal its author's intentions, and yet most readers are left with the feeling that they know just what Thucydides thought: Pericles is good, human nature is bad, war and civil strife bring out the worst in us, and so forth."