History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

First transcribed:Historia tou Peloponnesiacou polemou, 431-404 b.c.e. (English translation, 1550)

Type of work: History

Time of plot: 431-411 b.c.e.

Locale: Greece and the Mediterranean

Principal personages

• Pericles, the founder of Athenian democracy
• Thucydides, an Athenian general and historian
• Demosthenes, a famous orator
• Alcibiades, an Athenian general and turncoat
• Nicias, an Athenian general
• Archidamus, the king of Sparta
• Brasidas, a Spartan general

The Work:

In writing his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides looked for human causes behind results and refused to credit the gods with responsibility for the acts of human beings. Impartially he chronicles the clash of a military and a commercial imperialism: the land empire of the Spartans confronting the Athenian maritime league. Some have attributed to him an attitude of moral indifference, such as is revealed in his report of the debate between Athenian and Melian ambassadors, but he wrote with no intention of either moralizing or producing a cultural history. He was a military man interested in the vastly different political and economic patterns of Athens and Sparta. Writing for intelligent readers rather than for the ignorant masses, he saw in the modes and ideals of their cultures an explanation of their ways of warfare.

The eight books of Thucydides’ history, divided into short paragraph-chapters, provide a few facts about their author. In book 4, for example, he refers to himself as “Thucydides, son of Olorus, who wrote this history.” He must have been wealthy, for, discussing Brasidas’s attack on Amphipolis, he states that the Spartan “heard that Thucydides had the right of working gold mines in the neighboring district of Thrace and was consequently one of the leading men of the city.” He also tells frankly of his failure as the commander of a relief expedition to that city and of his twenty years’ exile from Athens as punishment. Apparently he spent the years of his exile in travel among the sites of the battles he describes, thereby increasing the accuracy of his details. Students of warfare find that he gives descriptions of the tricks and stratagems of both siege and defense. Not until 404, after the war had ended, did he return to Athens. He seems to have been killed about 400 b.c.e., either in Thrace for the gold he carried, or in Athens for publicly writing his opinions.

In his masterpiece of Greek history, the Athenian Thucydides wrote of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians from the time it began, “believing it would be great and memorable above all previous wars.” Thucydides explains the rivalry of Athens and Sparta, the two great states of Hellas then at the height of their power. He was proud of the advances made by his native Athens over the ways of the barbarians. “In ancient times the Hellenes carried weapons because their homes were undefended and intercourse unsafe.” Swords, however, like the old-fashioned linen undergarments and the custom of binding the hair in knots, had gone out of style by his time.

Rivalry between the two cities had a long tradition. It had kept Spartans from fighting beside Athenians at Marathon, but it took a commercial form when the Lacedaemonians demanded that their allies, the Megarians, be allowed to market their products in Athens. Pericles, the orator, statesman, and patron of the arts, took the first step toward breaking his own Thirty Years’ Truce, agreed upon in 445 b.c.e. In a fiery oration, he declared that to yield to the Spartans would reduce the Athenians to vassals.

The final break, according to Thucydides, came later. He dates the year, 431, according to the calendars of the three leading states: Chrysis had been high priestess of Argos for forty-eight years, Aenesias was ephor of Sparta, and Pythodorus was concluding his archonship in Athens. In that year Thebes, at the invitation of disgruntled Plataean citizens, made a surprise attack on Plataea, a Boeotian ally of Athens.

To understand the situation fully, it is necessary to keep in mind a clash of political concepts that the historian does not mention. In 445 b.c.e., under Pericles, Athens had become a radical democracy whose policy was to send help to any democratically inclined community. Sparta and its allies were just as eager to promote their conservative oligarchy. To both, self-interest was paramount.

Violation of the truce by Thebes, says Thucydides, gave Athens an excuse to prepare for war. Its walled city could be defeated only by a fleet, and Sparta had no fleet. On the other hand, landlocked Sparta could withstand everything except a full-scale land invasion, and Athens had no army. The Lacedaemonians begged their friends in Italy and Sicily to collect and build ships, and Athens sent ambassadors to raise armies and completely surround Sparta. Thucydides was honest enough to admit that public opinion largely favored the Spartans, who posed as the liberators of Hellas.

Sparta moved first by invading the Isthmus of Corinth in 431 b.c.e. Strife during the winter and summer of the first year (as the historian divided his time) consisted largely of laying waste the fields around the fortified cities. Like many primitive peoples, the Greeks stopped fighting during planting and harvesting (the entries frequently begin with: “The following summer, when the corn was coming into ear . . .”). The war was also halted for games, not only the Olympic games of 428, but the Delian, Pythian, and Isthmian games as well.

In the summer of the next year, a plague broke out in Athens and raged intermittently for three years. Seven chapters of book 2 provide a vivid description, “for I myself was attacked and witnessed the suffering of others.” The seriousness of the plague protected Athens because enemy troops were afraid to approach its walls.

The most vivid part of Thucydides’ history deals with the Syracuse campaign of 416. An embassy from Egesta, Sicily, sought Athenian help against its rival city of Selinus. The ambitious Alcibiades thought this would be a good excuse for Athens to annex Syracuse. With Alcibiades, Nicias, and Lamachus sharing the command, the best-equipped expeditionary force ever sent from a Greek city sailed for Sicily with 134 triremes, 5,100 hoplites or heavy-armed infantry, 480 archers, and 820 slingers.

Alcibiades left behind bitter enemies who accused him of defacing sacred statues on the day the fleet sailed. Though there was no evidence against him, he was ordered home to defend himself. Fearing treachery, he fled to Sparta, where he was warmly welcomed. Informed of the Athenian expedition, the Lacedaemonians sent a military adviser to Syracuse. The Persians offered to outfit a fleet for Alcibiades to lead against Athens. His patriotism outweighed his injured pride, however, and eventually he returned to Athens and won several victories for the city before another defeat sent him again into exile. This occurred, however, after the period covered by Thucydides’ history.

In the campaign before Syracuse, Nicias disregarded the advice of Demosthenes and was defeated on both land and sea. “Of all the Hellenic actions on record,” writes Thucydides, “this was the greatest, the most glorious to the victor, and the most ruinous to the vanquished. Fleet and army vanished from the face of the earth; nothing was saved, and out of the many who went forth, few returned home. This ended the Sicilian expedition.”

The account of the expedition practically ends Thucydides’ history. There is another book, but it does not rise to the dramatic pitch of book 7. Though he lived eleven years after these events and four years after the end of the war, Thucydides did not chronicle its last stages, perhaps because they were too painful. After Alcibiades was exiled a second time, Sparta starved the Athenians into surrender, and with this defeat their glory faded. For the next thirty years Sparta was the supreme power in Hellas.

As Thomas Macaulay wrote, Thucydides surpassed all his rivals as the historian of the ancient world. Perhaps not as colorful as Herodotus, “the Father of History,” he was certainly more accurate; and although the annals of Tacitus contain excellent character delineation, his pages, by contrast, are cold. Thucydides may be superficial in his observations and shallow in his interpretation of events, but he accumulated facts and dates and presented them in a three-dimensional picture of people and places. For this reason his work has survived for more than two thousand years.

Bibliography

Greenwood, Emily. Thucydides and the Shaping of History. London: Duckworth, 2006. Examines the History of the Peloponnesian War within the context of literature and society in Thucydides’ day, analyzing the work’s narrative techniques and its relationship to ancient Greek theater. Demonstrates how the book poses intellectual questions for future historians.

Hildebrand, Alice von, ed. Greek Culture: The Adventure of the Human Spirit. New York: Braziller, 1966. An insightful discussion of two texts from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Concludes that the work illuminates the glory of the Greek spirit and civilization. Contains illustrations, preface, and introduction.

Kennedy, George. The Art of Persuasion in Greece. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. Points out Thucydides’ rhetorical strategy in writing the History of the Peloponnesian War and the ways in which it differs from that of his predecessor, Herodotus. Analyzes Thucydides’ narrative power.

Livingstone, R. W., ed. The Pageant of Greece. Oxford, England: Clarendon, 1953. A collection of works from antiquity. Concludes that Thucydides’ narrative power is rooted in his personal struggle to understand the “true picture of the events of the war” by recording only a firsthand account of what he saw. A helpful source for beginning researchers of Thucydides. Illustrated.

Rood, Tim. Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Analyzes the narrative techniques in the History of the Peloponnesian War, demonstrating how Thucydides relates the events of the war while simultaneously revealing truths about the human condition.

Shanske, Darien. Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Examines the difficult language and structure of History of the Peloponnesian War, noting similarities with the language, structure, and philosophy of ancient Greek tragedy.

Strauss, Leo. The City and Man. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. Notes the need to review the history of classical antiquity. Addresses Thucydides as a “scientific historian” who wrote for all ages.

Zumbrunnen, John. Silence and Democracy: Athenian Politics in Thucydides’ “History.” University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Focuses on a political theme of Thucydides’ work: the role of the elite in relation to the silent mass public in the creation and functioning of a democracy. Examines the meaning of democracy in Thucydides’ time and in the present-day United States.