I lived through the whole of it, being of an age to understand what was happening,
and I put my mind to the subject so as to get an accurate view of it. It happened,
too, that I was banished from my country for twenty years after my command at
Amphipolis; I saw what was being done on both sides, particularly on the
Peloponnesian side, because of my exile, and this leisure gave me rather
exceptional facilities for looking into things.
(5, 26)Inthe event, he did not complete the history, finishing in midsentence in 411. The
event referred to here, when, as Athenian general, he lost Amphipolis in 423 to the
Spartan Brasidas, is narrated stoically at 4, 103–108. It is supposed that he was in
exile until the end of the war. The Athenian assembly, which later ordered the
execution of all surviving generals after the battle of Arginusae in 406, was always
likely to deal harshly with those who did not deliver success. Even Pericles had been
fined in the last year of his life (2, 65). Little of Thucydides’ life is known apart from
what he tells us himself, but he was from an aristocratic family and his own political
inclinations may be inferred from his comment on the government of the moderate
oligarchy of the Five Thousand: ‘Indeed, during the first period of this new regime
the Athenians appear to have had a better government than ever before, at least in
my time. There was a reasonable and moderate blending of the few and the many’
(8, 97).
Like Herodotus, he relied chiefly on oral sources and, unlike Herodotus, he did
not have the disadvantage of often dealing with long-forgotten events. In the
comparison between the two great historians that has often been made, Thucydides
has always been regarded as the more scientific, the more accurate and reliable in
matters of chronology and fact, and the more questioning and searching in his
powers of analysis, whether that be in sifting the evidence of his sources, or in
coming to conclusions about motives and underlying causes. Moreover, unlike
Herodotus, Thucydides, the rationalist, regarded the historical process as an
entirely human affair and excluded the divine from his account, though he
recognized, of course, the influence played by belief in the divine upon human
events, as in the case of the failure of the Athenian general Nicias, ‘who was rather
over-inclined to divination and such things’ (7, 50), to make a politic retreat at a
crucial junction in the Sicilian campaign because of an eclipse of the moon. He is
seen at his scientific best in his clinical description of the plague (which he caught
himself) in the second year of the war (2, 47–54), which he sees not as a divine
judgement but as an unforeseen event with greatly demoralizing psychological
effects. The uncrowned gods in Thucydides’ narrative are chance and the
unforeseen.
His scientific method is to serve a scientific purpose:
40 THE GREEKS