Thucydides

Thucydides (between 460 and 455 BC–circa 400 BC, Greek ??????????, Thoukudídês) 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. This work is widely regarded a classic, and represents the first work of its kind.

Historian

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 unconcious biases — for example, to modern eyes he seems to underestimate the importance of Persian intervention — but Thucydides was the first historian who seems to be attempting to be completely objective. By his discovery of historic causation he created the first scientific approach to history.

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The only major difference between Thucydides' history and that of a modern historian is that Thucydides' history includes lengthy speeches which, as he himself describes, were as best as could be remembered of what was said (or, perhaps, what he thought ought to have been said). These speeches are used in a literary manner. Take, for example, Pericles' funeral speech, which includes an impassioned moral defence of democracy, heaping honour on the dead till it is often quoted in War memorials:

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: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.

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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:

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: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.

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In addition to disputing his status as the first historian, some authors, including Richard Ned Lebow, reject the common perception of Thucydides as a historian of naked real-politik. 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.

Related Topics:
Real-politik - Melian dialogue

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