What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.

— Thucydides, “History of the Peloponnesian War”, 1.23

In the long tapestry of Greek history, few names stand as tall or austere as that of Thucydides. To call him merely a historian is to do him a disservice. In a world where Herodotus lay the foundation for historical storytelling with divine interventions, moral lessons, and sweeping cultural panoramas, Thucydides offered something colder, harder, and far more piercing: He gave the world a study in realism. Herodotus may have invented the practice of recounting the past to give us his history of the war with Persia, but to many Thucydides is the true “first historian”, for recounting causes and effects that make the world we know today.

[ABOVE: Thucydides' bust, now held in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto]

Thucydides was a product of the intellectual revolution that swept through Classical Greece. He lived through the darkest decades of the Peloponnesian War, not just as a distant observer but as an Athenian soldier and general, a failed commander, and ultimately an exile. This proximity to power, combined with his education and experience, gave him a front-row seat to the mechanisms of empire, politics, human ambition and ruin.

Where Herodotus had colour and curiosity, Thucydides had rigour and restraint. He stripped the divine from history and turned instead to what he called “the truest cause” (alēthestatē prophasis) behind events. He was among the first to suggest that human actions driven by fear, honour, and self-interest follow recognisable patterns. To Thucydides, history was not a lesson in morality or a stage for gods, but a grim and repetitive study of what men do when given power.

His History of the Peloponnesian War would become one of the most influential texts in Western canon, not just for its content but for its method. Though it remains unfinished, the work survives as a model of political analysis, tactical detail, and tragic insight. The war it recounts - the clash between the democracy of Athens and oligarchic Sparta - was more than a military conflict; it was a civilisational reckoning, and Thucydides wrote it as such.

[ABOVE: Thucydides mosaic from Jerash, in modern-day Jordan, c.3rd century AD, now held in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin]

Please check out my previous Greek history post on the tragedian poet, Euripides

BACKGROUND

Thucydides was born around 460 BC, no later than 454 BC, likely in the Athenian deme of Halimus, just a short walk from the sea, a fitting birthplace for a man whose life would be shaped by the navy, his exile and Athens’s maritime empire-league. His family was aristocratic, wealthy, and well-connected, a family that would provide plenty of opposition to Pericles' democracy.

[ABOVE: Marble bust of Pericles, with the inscription "Pericles, son of Xanthippus, Athenian". Roman copy of a Greek original, c.430 BC]

His father, Olorus, bore a Thracian name, suggesting ties to the aristocracy of Thrace, and possibly a distant link to the royal family of that region. Through this connection, Thucydides would later inherit gold mines, near Scapte Hyle on the Thracian coastline, wealth that gave him the means to live in exile and yet remain politically observant and literarily active.

It is likely that Thucydides received a traditional aristocratic education, one coated in philosophy, rhetoric and likely some natural science. Though Thucydides never cites specific teachers, many scholars have speculated that he may have been influenced by the intellectual atmosphere created by the likes of Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and even Socrates. What’s clear is that he came of age in the intellectually dynamic era of Pericles’s Athens, when inquiry, oratory and criticism were shaping the city's golden age even as its foundations were quietly beginning to crack.

THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

When the Peloponnesian War officially begun in 431 BC, Thucydides got right to work, predicting correctly that the war would be, "more momentous than any previous conflict".

Thucydides’ political sympathies remain a subject of debate. He admired Pericles, devoting an entire section of his book to praising his leadership and foresight. But he was no radical democrat, and he viewed the Athenian assembly with increasing scepticism as the war progressed. This distance - perhaps disdain - for the volatility of mass democracy would shape the analytical coldness and tragic undertones of his writings.

His first entry into public life came as a general (strategos) stationed on the isle of Thasos during the war. In 424 BC, he was tasked with defending Amphipolis, situated on the River Strymon in Thrace, a vital Athenian colony and linchpin of Athens’s northern interests. But fate turned against him. The Spartan general Brasidas, in one of the war’s most brilliant manoeuvres, took the city before Thucydides could arrive with reinforcements, and the city surrendered without much resistance.

[ABOVE: The ruins of Amphipolis, depicting the bridge over the River Strymon, the acropolis and the city's fortifications. Engraved by E. Cousinéry, 1831]

For this failure, the Athenian assembly exiled Thucydides for twenty years. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Thucydides writes very highly of the Spartan general who bested him, as describing the man who defeated you as not such a great general would in turn have made Thucydides look more incompetent.

WRITING IN EXILE

This exile, Thucydides later claimed, was a blessing in disguise. Removed from the day-to-day tumult of Athenian politics and military duty, he travelled widely, gathering testimonies from all sides of the conflict. It was in exile that he began writing his great work - a history not of events alone, but of causes, speeches, plagues, patterns and terrible human truths that seemed to surface in wartime.

He did not write as victor, nor as moralist, but as a man who had witnessed the best and worst of his city, from battles to plagues, and still believed that truth could be uncovered, even amid the fog of war. His wide travels abroad gave him perspectives of the war that those cosied up in Athens could never receive, and his travels included Sparta itself, giving him further greater perspectives on the war.

COMPARING TO HERODOTUS

Prose writing was still new to the Greek world of the time. The earliest of its kind was Herodotus, detailing events surrounding the rise of Persia up to the wars with the Greeks. He wrote in a discursive manner, moving from one topic to another - often for dozens of pages - before returning to the original topic like nothing happened, but it allowed Herodotus to also provide a history of all the locations and people he was writing about. This all goes in hard contrast with Thucydides’ style. Leaving aside Herodotus’ use of oracles, divine will, folklore and heresay, Thucydides took the sterner route. Book 1.22 lays his intent out:

In recording the events of the war my principle has been not to rely on casual information or my own suppositions, but to apply the greatest possible rigour in pursuing every detail both of what I saw myself and of what I heard from others.

 - 1.22

He states how laborious it was, given many accounts he received conflicted with one another. Really, this is the Western world’s first great declaration of empirical historiography, as a forensic record of events almost. Thucydides used the scientific study of history to uncover aspects of reoccurring human nature, namely politics, power and fear.

[ABOVE: A double herm depicting Herodotus (left) and Thucydides (right), now held in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples (inv. 6239)]

It isn’t just that he strayed slightly from Herodotian myth and divinity, but he avoided it altogether. He wished to uncover not what people thought should have happened, but simply what did. This relentless pursuit of objective historical truth has since become pretty much the basis for the entire world when it comes to historical studies, influencing the likes of Hobbs and Machiavelli.

Thucydides was also interested in causality and motives; he distinguishes between the two types of reasons for war - proximate and ultimate - famously stating,

In my view the real reason, true but unacknowledged, which forced the war was the growth of Athenian power and Spartan fear of it…

 - 1.23

Thucydides was a revolutionary when it came to considering how power, translated to others often as fear and/or envy, ends up causing conflict, perhaps more-so than the traditional view of causality being attributed to treaties and honour.

His narrative structure too was innovative: while he admits to his recorded speeches being only recorded as closely as possible or reconstructed to reflect what was called for each situation, Thucydides paired speeches from opposite sides of the battlefields in order to present important political or ideological debates. This was less deliberate fabrication and more dramatised analysing. The main difference between Athens and Sparta - that being the former known for its democracy and individualism and the latter for its oligarchy, diarchy and collectivism - is often on full display in many of his speeches. Speeches in his Histories weren’t theatre, but a way of capturing the persuasion and logic behind events.

So, does this former Athenian general have biases in his work? Perhaps in places, but he certainly was critical of his home state as much as he was of Sparta. Nowhere is this more evident than Books six and seven - the Sicilian Expedition - which comes off both as a great tragedy and a greater highlight of democratic failings, poor leadership and organisation, and hubris.

THE BOOK'S LAYOUT

Here’s how his book is laid out: in total, his Histories has eight books. The first book is an introduction to the Peloponnesian War, quickly detailing events up to the war’s start in 431 BC to provide some background.

[ABOVE: Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 16 fragment of Thucydides' Histories Book 4.36-41, c.1st century AD]

Book 2 begins the war, going from the summer of 431 BC to the winter of 428 BC, including events such as Pericles’ oratory speech, the Plague of Athens and Pericles’ death.

Book 3 is where the major battles begin, battles such as Rhium and Naupactus dominating the early narrative alongside the Mytilene Revolt.

Book 4 covers the harder-hitting battles, such as the humiliating double-blow to Sparta at Pylos and Sphacteria, and the literally fiery battle and siege of Delium.

Book 5 covers the “peace” of Nicias and the subsequent “peaceful” battle of Mantinea.

Books 6 and 7 are the Sicilian Expedition… enough said; it’s a disaster… The battle, that is, not the writing.

Finally, Book 8 introduces Persia to the war via the jingling of gold coins, and details the Athenian coup.

And Book 9? It doesn’t exist. Come the war’s end in 405 BC, Thucydides either died in exile or returned all so briefly to Athens to finish his work. He would, however, only finish the events detailing up to the autumn of 411 BC, as he died around the year 400 BC, before any further work could be compiled, to the best of modern knowledge. At the very least, no work beyond what we have of Book 8 was ever published.

[ABOVE: 10th century minuscule manuscript of Thucydides' Histories, from "An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography" OUP by Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, 1912]

Presumably, Thucydides died before he could perfect his later Books, since the prose and polished writing style seem to diminish slightly towards the end, with less grandiose speeches being present and put in the mouths of generals before combat. The rest of the war is detailed primarily by Xenophon, another Athenian general and historian, who begins his work exactly where Thucydides left off; his book literally begins as follows:

Some days later…

 - Xenophon, A History of My Times, 1.1.1

It’s almost as if Thucydides himself could not bear to write the rest of the Athenian tragedy he himself came to witness.

CONCLUSION

Overall his work showcases great levels of intellect; his intelligence and energy he put towards establishing the facts of the events described and penetrated his pre-judgements of general issues. He explains events wholly in clear, human terms, composing his work skilfully with a good mixture of simple and complex, vivid narrative structure, sprinkled with speeches which explore power’s nature in men - Thucydides’ work is absolutely the “permanent legacy” which he wanted it to be, and it remains our primary source on such a pivotal war in human history… alongside Xenophon, of course, but more on him later.

So, I guess to honour Thucydides as best as I can, it seems only fitting that I should end this post right in the middle of a

NEXT POST: BLOOD IN THE STREETS OF ATHENS: The Thirty Tyrants, 404 - 403 BC

Coming soon...

SOURCES

• Thucydides, "History of the Peloponnesian War"
• Xenophon, "Histories"

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