Thucydides

Thucydides was an Athenian commander who, after failing in the field, turned to recording the war he had fought in. His account of the long struggle between Athens and Sparta in the late fifth century BCE set out to explain events through evidence and human motives rather than the will of the gods, and it is still read as a founding work of both history-writing and the study of power politics.

He was born around 460 BCE and tells us himself that he was an Athenian of the deme of Halimous and that his father was called Olorus. That name was linked with Thracian royalty, and it is likely that his family was related to the aristocratic general Cimon, whose grandfather bore the same name. Thucydides also mentions that he held rights to gold mines on the Thracian coast opposite the island of Thasos, a source of wealth that later allowed him to devote himself to research. A later story that as a boy he wept on hearing Herodotus read his work in public is probably an invention.

The Peloponnesian War began in 431 BCE, and Thucydides says he started taking notes at once, convinced that it would be the greatest conflict the Greeks had yet fought. When plague struck Athens early in the war he caught it and recovered; his description of the symptoms and of the breakdown of public order is one of the best-known passages of ancient prose, and it includes an early recognition that survivors did not fall ill a second time. The epidemic also killed Pericles, the statesman he most admired.

In 424 BCE he was one of the Athenian generals and was stationed at Thasos. That winter the Spartan commander Brasidas moved against Amphipolis, a strategically vital town on the nearby Thracian coast. Thucydides sailed to its aid, but Brasidas offered the townspeople generous terms and they gave in before he arrived. Athens held him responsible, and he spent the next twenty years in exile.

Exile gave him time and access to both sides. He travelled among Sparta's allies as well as Athens' and questioned eyewitnesses. His History of the Peloponnesian War, later divided into eight books, runs from the causes of the war to the middle of 411 BCE, after the Athenian disaster in Sicily, and then stops mid-narrative, leaving the last seven years untold. Remarks in the text show he was still revising it after Athens surrendered in 404 BCE.

He promised a work meant to last for ever rather than to win applause, and he left out myth and divine intervention. Yet he also put long speeches into the mouths of his characters, admitting that these were his reconstructions of what was suitable to the occasion rather than exact records. The funeral oration of Pericles, the cold debate between Athenian envoys and the islanders of Melos, and his analysis of civil war on Corcyra are the most famous.

How he died is uncertain. Pausanias reports that he was allowed home after the war and murdered on the way, while Plutarch preserves a story that he was killed in Thrace and his remains brought to Athens. Some evidence in the text suggests he was still alive around 397 BCE. He is generally thought to have died around 400 BCE.

The first Latin translation, by Lorenzo Valla, was made between 1448 and 1452, and in 1628 Thomas Hobbes produced the first English version taken directly from the Greek. Nineteenth-century scholars praised his use of evidence, and in the twentieth century students of international relations made him, with Niccolò Machiavelli and Hobbes, a forefather of political realism, the view that states act chiefly from fear and self-interest. His book remains a standard text at military colleges.

Our 400 BCE map shows the Greek world of present-day Greece just after the war he described, beside the still-powerful Achaemenid Empire.