As was the custom, Athens punished Thucydides by exiling him from Athens for 20 years. With lots of time on his hands, Thucydides decided to write a prose account of the war as it happened, almost like a modern news reporter. He traveled extensively into the war zones, observed battles, interviewed Athenian and Spartan military and political leaders, and read documents relating to the war.
He was the first to analyze human behavior in wartime. He concluded that war was rooted in human nature and would be repeated in the future. Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides rejected telling crowd-pleasing stories and concentrated on the facts of important events.
He avoided writing about myths, oracles, and superstitions. He recognized that even eyewitnesses could not always be reliable sources.
In general, he tried hard to be accurate, fair, and unbiased. Like Herodotus, Thucydides quoted speeches, but these actually took place. Thucydides heard some of them himself. Typically slow to act, Sparta finally agreed to lead the fight against Athens, demanding that it restore independence to the Greek cities under its control. Thucydides wrote that only an honest leader like Pericles could make Athenian democracy work.
Thucydides was interested in how both soldiers and civilians behaved in wartime. Athens quickly crushed the revolt, and the people of the city slaughtered the rebel faction. This incident prompted Thucydides to comment on the evils of revolution:. The sufferings that revolution entailed upon cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same.
The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition. As the war resumed, Athenian leaders argued for a major military expedition to Sicily.
The expedition failed to attack Syracuse immediately, allowing the city to prepare strong defenses and get help from Sparta. The Athenians failed in several assaults on the city, including an unusual night attack that Thucydides described. Trapped, Athenian troops panicked and tried to escape inland. The Syracusans followed them, killing and capturing many. Thucydides described how it all ended at a river crossing:. Meanwhile the opposite [river] bank, which was steep, was lined with Syracusans, who showered missiles down upon the Athenians, most of them drinking greedily and heaped together in disorder in the hollow bed of the river.
The [Spartans] also came down and butchered them, especially those in the water, which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they went on drinking the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most even fighting to have it. As the war dragged on, atrocities on both sides increased. Probably the worst was a massacre in the defenseless city of Mycalessus in B. Thucydides described the horror:. The Thracians bursting into Mycalessus sacked the houses and temples and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither youth nor age but killing all they fell in with, one after the other, children and women.
The war, however, continued for seven more years until Sparta won a decisive victory over the Athenian fleet, finally forcing Athens to surrender in B. We do not know why Thucydides never finished his History. He died, some ancient sources say violently, around B. Herodotus and Thucydides invented history, or at least the writing of it, in the Western world. Before Herodotus, the Greeks had no word for history in the sense of writing a narration of past events in prose.
Herodotus may have been the first Western historian, but Thucydides was the first modern one. He explained the causes of events, analyzed political developments like revolutions, and evaluated leaders such as Pericles.
In addition, like historians today, he was rigorous in searching for the truth and discarding information that he could not verify. According to Herodotus, what were the causes of the Persian Wars? According to Thucydides, how did the Spartans and Athenians differ in their reasons for going to war with one another? Compare Herodotus and Thucydides as historians.
In the other, Thucydides will answer questions on the Peloponnesian War. Choose two students to role play the Greek historians. Have the historians prepare by reading the article and preparing to answer questions that might be asked. Divide the rest of the class into two groups—one group will role play reporters questioning Herodotus. The other will role play reporters and question Thucydides. They should read the article and prepare questions that seek the opinion of the historian.
To Herodotus: What do you think was the main cause of the Persian Wars? Wikipedia: The Histories Answers. Sparta Essay on the society of Sparta. Sparta General overview of Sparta, with emphasis of the women of the civilization. History of Sparta Extensive history of Sparta.
Persian Wars Timeline Timeline of major events. Thucydides Short biography and explanation of the History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides Detailed biography of Thucydides. On the Life and History Thucydides Another biographical source. The Peloponnesian War Comprehensive resource complete with extensive timeline and translations. The History of the Peloponnesian War The full text of the book.
Thucydides caught the plague during the epidemic of and was among the lucky few who recovered. In he was one of the Athenian generals operating in the Chalcidice during the Peloponnesian War Through a miscarriage of planning, Amphipolis was captured by the Spartan general Brasidas, the greatest general of the war. Having failed to relieve Amphipolis, Thucydides was exiled for 20 years. It is said that the demagogue Cleon was instrumental in bringing about his exile.
Thucydides spent his exile on family estates in Thrace. This enforced leisure gave him the time to observe critically the course of the war.
It is considered certain that he returned to Athens after the war. He apparently lived there, utterly forgotten, until his death sometime toward the beginning of the 4th century. Thucydides writes of himself in the third person in his History. He relates that he was a general at the age of 30 4.
The only extant work by Thucydides is the incomplete History of the Peloponnesian War in eight books. He apparently did not live to complete the final section. The text of Thucydides has come down emended by editors, and it is difficult and oftentimes obscure.
It is important to note that no Attic prose was taught prior to Thucydides, so he had to create a prose style of his own. Thucydides is the first historian in the modern sense— that is, he strives for accuracy and impartiality. His accounts of military campaigns and battles show this and point up the fact that he himself was an experienced military man.
He reveals a reluctance to accept unsupported statements, and he carefully weighs and sifts the statements of others. He consulted actual documents and even inserted them into his text. This scholarship and meticulousness were obviously a result of Sophistic influence and training. Thucydides had been familiar with the work of his predecessors in Greek historiography, though nowhere does he mention anyone by name except for Hellanicus of Mitylene, and he criticizes Mitylene severely for his lack of chronological exactitude in his account of the period between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars.
Of his predecessors in general, Thucydides was highly critical because they accepted traditions without validating the veracity of them 1. Also, he pointed out that his predecessors did not exclude myths from their histories 1.
Although Thucydides at no time mentions his great predecessor Herodotus by name, he does correct a number of passages in Herodotus's History; for example, 1. What is the measure of a great leader or a great democracy? He was born in the Athenian suburb of Halimos and was in Athens during the plague of c. In , he was given command of a fleet, but was then exiled for failing to reach the city of Amphipolis in time to prevent its capture by the Spartans.
Observe he did. During 20 years of exile, he worked on his history—collecting information, writing and revising. Sparta, located in the Peloponnese the southern peninsula of mainland Greece , was most powerful as a land force. Its system of government favored austere militarism and adherence to tradition. The initial 10 years of the conflict saw annual Spartan land raids countered by Athenian sea attacks. In , the Athenians under their leader Cleon made an unsuccessful attempt to retake Amphipolis.
Both Cleon and the Spartan general Brasidas died in the battle, pushing the war-weary sides to negotiate a treaty. An uneasy peace followed, but six years later Athens launched a seaborne expedition against Syracuse, an ally of Sparta in distant Sicily. This proved disastrous, and the Athenians were driven from the island in by the combined Sicilian and Spartan forces. Athens surrendered to Sparta in Thucydides is careful to note that at times he records only the gist of what was said, or what he thinks should have been said.
At other times the speeches form dialogues, as stronger and weaker parties debate the ethics of war. The Melian dialogue, from just a few years later, records the leaders of a neutral island pleading with Athens for their survival. Thucydides, unlike Herodotus , makes very little reference to the Greek gods as active agents in history, preferring to understand events in terms of their human causes.
It took several generations for Thucydides to attain his now-unassailed place as one of the greatest historians of all time. Aristotle , who lived a few decades later and wrote about the same era, never mentions him. By the first century B.
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