Thucydides — History of the Peloponnesian War

notes

Thucydides (c. 460–400 BCE) was an Athenian general exiled after a military failure in Thrace in 424 BCE, who spent the rest of his life composing the history of the Peloponnesian War — the twenty-seven-year conflict (431–404 BCE) between Athens and Sparta and their allies. The work is unfinished, breaking off in the middle of Book VIII, but is universally regarded as the founding document of scientific historiography — history written as an inquiry into causes rather than as a narrative of the acts of the gods. Where Herodotus is discursive, credulous, and warm, Thucydides is severe, analytical, and cold. His preface (Book I above) is the first statement of the historical method: reject legend, seek witnesses, cross-check accounts, prefer accuracy to entertainment. His set-piece speeches — Pericles' Funeral Oration, the Melian Dialogue, Nicias's letter from Sicily — are reconstructions, but they are the earliest instances of what would become political oratory as a literary form. The excerpts here include: the method and preface; Pericles' Funeral Oration (Book II), the classical statement of the Athenian democratic ideal; the Plague of Athens (Book II), a description of pandemic and social collapse that remains one of the great case studies for historians of epidemics; the Melian Dialogue (Book V), the coldest exposition of realpolitik ever written ("the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must"); and the Sicilian Disaster (Book VII), one of the greatest sustained passages of tragic history. Translation: Richard Crawley, "History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides," London: Longmans, 1874. Public domain.

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