The result is, of course, that he has his limitations. The silences of Colonel Thucydides are impenetrable
for us; we have no means of knowing why he does not mention what he does not mention, or how much
he does not mention. We cannot construct history from him, we can only accept or reject his
conclusions. This would not matter if he were as perfect a historian as some have believed. But there is
good reason to suspect that he was sometimes swayed by personal bias: his account of Pericles is surely
too favourable, his account of Cleon omits a number of vital facts. Again what ultimately do the
speeches represent, if no one ever spoke like that, and word and thought are so closely connected?
Where does this leave his account of decision-making? Moreover the very power of Thucydides'
illumination throws into prominence the darkness around it: he systematically ignores the significance of
Persia-the war is a war of Greek states. Would he ever have faced the fact that ultimately it was Persian
gold which defeated the Athenians?
Many of these limitations reflect the aims of his work: 'it will be enough if it is considered useful by
those who wish to judge clearly both what has happened and what will come about again in the future, in
the same or similar fashion, given the nature of man' (1.22). Thucydides here asserts no crude theory of
repetition, but merely the usefulness of the study of human society in action. But what sort of society?
Obviously not Persian, yet equally perhaps not merely Greek-rather the self-conscious political society
in which decisions are taken by rational and open discussion and in accordance with rational principles.
That is why political scientists from Machiavelli onwards have taken Thucydides as their ideal historian:
Thomas Hobbes called him 'the most politick historiographer that ever writ'.
The influence of the sophists on Thucydides' theory of politics is clear. Thucydides seems to accept as a
general fact about human society that 'might is right'-societies are in fact organized in terms of self-
interest, and states act-in accordance with self-interest: appeals to sentiment are seldom made in his
work, and when made are unsuccessful. Athens holds her empire as a tyranny 'which it may have been
wrong to acquire, but is dangerous to surrender' (speech of Pericles, 2.63). The philosophical expression
of such views is given most clearly by the sophist Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato's Republic. So
in terms of social morality no one is ever in the right or the wrong: once Sparta's fear of Athens has been
isolated, it is clear that the war is 'in accordance with nature'. We know that this view of society was not
a universal view in the fifth century, and very probably not a majority view; nevertheless it was clearly
an influential one, and Thucydides cannot be accused of solipsism or completely falsifying the nature of
political debates. That he has not given a full account of the decision-making procedure is already
obvious from the way that the speeches are offered as antithetical pairs, not as part of a general debate.
Many of the speeches in fact serve more as a vehicle for exploring the consequences of the Thucydidean
view of politics than as an accurate account of what was actually said. On the two occasions when
Thucydides himself offers sustained political analysis he is less successful: the account of the
development of political leadership at Athens after the death of Pericles (2.65) and the discussion of the
nature of political revolution during the war in relation to the example of Corcyra (3. 82-4) are both
unsatisfactory in their attempt to impose a linear progression on complex phenomena.
Despite his acceptance of this type of social theory, Thucydides is deeply concerned with its
consequences, and especially with the resulting problems of morality; he seems particularly interested in
the effects of such theories on internal politics. The famous funeral oration of Pericles over the Athenian