Who was Thucydides?

Thucydides, (born 460 bc or earlier?—died after 404 bc , greatest of ancient Greek historians
and author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, which recounts the struggle between
Athens and Sparta in the 5th century bc. His work was the first recorded political and moral
analysis of a nation’s war policies.

All that is certainly known (perhaps all that ancient scholars knew) of Thucydides’ life is what he
reveals about himself in the course of his narrative. He was an Athenian, old enough when the
war began to estimate its importance and judge that it was likely to be a long one and to write an
account of it, observing and making notes from its beginning. He was probably born, therefore,
not later than 460—perhaps a few years earlier since his detailed narrative begins, just before
431, with the events which provoked the war. He was certainly older than 30 when he was
elected stratēgos, a military magistrate of great importance, in 424. Hence, he belongs to the
generation younger than that of the Greek historian Herodotus.

Scope and plan of the History

The History, which is divided into eight books, probably not by Thucydides’ design, stops in the
middle of the events of the autumn of 411 bc, more than six and a half years before the end of the
war. This much at least is known: that three historians, Cratippus (a younger contemporary),
Xenophon (who lived a generation later), and Theopompus (who lived in the last third of the 4th
century), all began their histories of Greece where Thucydides left off. Xenophon, one might say,
began the next paragraph nearly as abruptly as Thucydides ended his.

So it is certain that Thucydides’ work was well known soon after publication and that no more
was ever published other than the eight books that have survived; it may reasonably be inferred
from the silence of the available sources that no separate section of the work was published in his
lifetime

Study of the war’s technical aspects

Thucydides was also interested in the technical aspect of the war. The most important problems
in the war, besides protecting food supplies during land fighting, centered around the difficulties
and possibilities of war between an all-powerful land force (Sparta and its allies) and an all-
powerful naval force (Athens). Thucydides also studied the details of siege warfare; the
difficulties of the heavily armed combat in mountain country and of fighting against the fierce
but unruly barbarians of the north; an army trying to force a landing from ships against troops on
shore.

Historical aims

Thucydides was himself an intellectual of the Athenian kind; markedly individualistic, his style
shows a man brought up in the company of Sophocles and Euripides, the playwrights, and the
philosophers Anaxagoras, Socrates, and the contemporary Sophists. His writing is condensed and
direct, almost austere in places, and is meant to be read rather than delivered orally. He explains
in a scientific and impartial manner the intricacies and complexities of the events he observed.
Only in his speeches does he sometimes fall short of the lucidity of the narrative prose; his
fondness for abstract expressions and the obscurity of his rhetorical antithesis often make the
passages difficult to understand.

Authority of his work

Thucydides kept rigidly to his theme: the history of a war—that is, a story of battles and sieges,
of alliances hastily made and soon broken, and, most important, of the behaviour of peoples as
the war dragged on and on, of the inevitable “corrosion of the human spirit.” He vividly narrates
exciting episodes and carefully describes tactics on land and sea. He gives a picture, direct in
speeches, indirect in the narrative, of the ambitious imperialism of Athens—controlled ambition
in Pericles, reckless in Alcibiades, debased in Cleon—ever confident that nothing was impossible
for them, resilient after the worst disaster. He shows also the opposing picture of the slow
steadiness of Sparta, sometimes so successful, at other times so accommodating to the enemy.

Subsequent fame

The story of his later fame is a curious one. It has been mentioned above that in the two
generations after his death three historians began their work where he had left off; but, apart from
this silent tribute and late stories of his great influence on the orator Demosthenes, Thucydides is
nowhere referred to in surviving 4th-century literature, not even in Aristotle, who, in his
Constitution of Athens, describes the revolution in Athens in 411 and diverges in many ways
from Thucydides’ account

Reference

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thucydides-Greek-historian
 BS mass communication 4th semester

Assignment # 1

Group 4

Mehwish mehboob 17271516-008

Shanza anwar 17271516-013

Bisma sabir 17271516-019

Hiba najeeb 17271516-028

Submitted to Ms. Samar

Fatima

Course code HIS-101

Course title Intro to

history

Submitted date 02, march

2019