Athenian politician, son-in-law of Cimon, and leader of the opposition to Pericles until ostracized in 443 BC. He was probably a relative of Thucydides, the historian.
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.
Life
Almost everything we know about the life of Thucydides comes from his own History of the Peloponnesian War. Another Thucydides was said to have lived before the one in question and was also linked with Thrace.
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.
He was probably in his twenties when the Peloponnesian War began, in 431 BC. He contracted the plague that ravaged Athens between 430 and 427 BC, killing Pericles, in 429 BC, along with thousands of other Athenians.
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. Eucles, the Athenian commander at Amphipolis, sent to Thucydides for help.
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 (see Battle of Amphipolis).
Amphipolis was of considerable strategic importance, and news of its fall caused great consternation in Athens. 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;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.
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. Pausanias goes on to say that Thucydides was murdered on his way back to Athens.
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.
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.
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." 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.
The History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides wrote only one book; (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.
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.
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). Take, for example, Pericles' funeral speech, which includes an impassioned moral defense of democracy, heaping honor on the dead:
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:
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.
On the other hand, some authors, including Richard Ned Lebow, reject the common perception of Thucydides as a historian of naked real-politik.
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. 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; 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.
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.
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