Greek Culture and Its Hellenistic Diffusion 43many religious festivals. They were performed in
open- air amphitheaters constructed at public expense,
and the actors were usually paid by the state. In fifth-
century Athens, as many as thirty thousand people
might attend a single performance. The first plays were
tragedies, a dramatic form probably invented by the
Athenians. The themes of Attic tragedy came with rare
exceptions from mythology and drew their dramatic
power from irreconcilable conflicts. The hero, who
might be a man or woman, is faced with a conflict,
not always between right and wrong, but sometimes
between right and right. He or she is undone either
by an unsuspected personal flaw or by hubris,the pride
born of overconfidence.
Among the greatest of the Greek dramatists
were Aeschylus (c. 525–456 B.C.), who may have
invented the tragedy as a dramatic form, and Sophocles
(c. 495–406 B.C.), whose Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Electra,
and other works continue to inspire modern authors.
Euripides (c. 484–406 B.C.) was more popular in the
fourth century B.C. than in his own time. His later
plays diluted the original tragic formula and led the
way to more personal and unheroic themes. A similar
progression is seen in comedy. The plays of Aris-
tophanes (c. 450–c. 388 B.C.) and his contemporaries,
usually known as the Old Comedy, were political
satire with a razor’s edge. As the third century B.C.
progressed, comedy lost its public focus and turned to
love stories and domestic situations.
The Greeks may also be said to have created his-
tory. Earlier peoples preserved king lists and inscrip-
tions that record the doings of royalty. The Hebrews
had chronicled their history to illuminate God’s pur-
poses, but the Greeks made history a branch of litera-
ture. The first writer to do this was Herodotus, whose
history of the Persian War was written specifically “to
preserve the memory of the past by putting on record
the astonishing achievements both of our own and of
the Asiatic peoples; secondly, and more particularly, to
show how the two races came into conflict.” The result
is both history and anthropology—an entertaining tour
of the ancient world, its cultures, and its myths. The
story of the war itself comes only toward the end of the
book. However, his portraits of individual leaders are
unforgettable, and he probably deserves his title, “the
father of history.”
The history of the Peloponnesian Wars by the
Athenian Thucydides (c. 460–c. 404 B.C.) is different
(see document 3.1). Exiled for his role as a naval com-
mander in the ill-fated attempt to relieve Amphipolis,
Thucydides was determined to understand the past be-
cause he believed that human nature was constant and
that history therefore repeats itself. If one knows the
past, it should be possible to avoid similar mistakes in the
future. Other cultures had believed that history moves in
cycles and that, as the biblical author of Ecclesiastes said
in a notable departure from Jewish tradition, “there is no
new thing under the sun.” But the Greeks, beginning
with Thucydides, used this ancient notion to justify the
systematic study of history. It was among the most origi-
nal of their achievements. Many of the better Roman his-
torians studied history to avoid the mistakes of the past,DOCUMENT 3.1
Thucydides: The Practice of History
In this famous passage, from The Peloponnesian War,
Thucydides lays the foundation for history as a serious intel-
lectual discipline. Few historians today believe that history re-
peats itself in any predictable way, but they appreciate
Thucydides’s critical approach to his sources.And with regard to my factual reporting of the
events of the war I have made it a principle not to
write down the first story that came my way, and
not even to be guided by my own general impres-
sions; either I was present myself at the events
which I described or else I heard of them from
eyewitnesses whose reports I have checked with as
much thoroughness as possible. Not that even so
the truth was easy to discover: different eyewit-
nesses have different accounts of the same events,
speaking out of partiality for one side or the other
or else from imperfect memories. And it may well
be that my history will seem less easy to read be-
cause of the absence in it of romantic elements. It
will be enough for me, however, if these words of
mine are judged useful by those who want to un-
derstand clearly the events which happened in the
past and which (human nature being what it is)
will at some time or other and in much the same
ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a
piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an
immediate public, but was done to last forever.
Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner. Balti-
more: Penguin Books, 1954. Copyright © Rex Warner, 1954.
Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.