Thucydides too is a product of the world of the developed city-state, and belongs to roughly the same
generation as the first local historians; but he proclaims himself a conscious rival of Herodotus in his
first sentence:
Thucydides of Athens wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesian and the Athenians,
beginning it as soon as war broke out and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of
record than any preceding one, on the evidence that both sides went into it at the height of preparedness,
and seeing the rest of the Greek world taking one side or the other, either immediately or after
consideration.
The main themes emerge at once: the explicit rivalry with Herodotus in the description of a great war,
the claim to contemporaneous recording, the emphasis on proving his views, the self-conscious assertion
of being a writer not a performer in an oral tradition, all expressed in a prose of extraordinary density
and sophistication. The war that Thucydides describes is the Great Peloponnesian War between Athens
and Sparta, which lasted for a whole generation from 431 to 404 B.C. with only a short interlude of
official, but broken, peace from 421 to 416, and ended with the defeat of Athens and the collapse of her
empire. Thucydides did not live to complete his work; Book 8 breaks off in mid sentence in 411; and
whereas Books 6 and 7 on the Athenian expedition to Sicily seem to be a polished work of art, there are
signs of lack of finish in Books 5 and 8. Thucydides' own activities in the war are best described by
himself:
I lived through the whole of the war, being of an age to comprehend events, and giving my attention to
them in order to know the exact truth about them. It was also my fate to be an exile from my country for
twenty years after my command at Amphipolis [in 424 he had failed to save the city from a surprise
attack]; and being present with both parties, and more especially with the Peloponnesians by reason of
my exile, I had considerable leisure to observe affairs. (5. 26)
Thucydides is first of all a historian's historian: he is obsessed with methodology. He sets out to prove
the greatness of his war by a long excursus on earlier history designed to show the comparative
insignificance of earlier wars and the poverty of earlier generations; and at the same time he offers a
devastating critique of the standards of evidence employed by Herodotus. He establishes with precision
the starting-point and the end of his war, and argues carefully that the so-called period of peace was
really part of a single war. Like his contemporaries he is fascinated by chronology, but he rejects their
lists of magistrates as unsuitable for military history; instead he dates by campaigning seasons, 'by
summers and winters'. He attacks the lack of care others take in ascertaining facts, and asserts that he
was not satisfied with any one eyewitness account, but took great pains to correlate and judge between
the often differing accounts of different participants. Even for the speeches in his work, he claims in a
famous problematical passage to give 'whatever seemed most appropriate to me for each speaker to say
in the particular circumstances, keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of what was actually
said'. These principles he recognizes will detract from the literary charm of his work: no matter, for its
aim is scientific, to be 'a possession for all time, not a display piece for instant listening' (1.22). In such
attitudes we recognize the first critical historian, the founder of the western tradition. It is perhaps
curious that we do so, for Thucydides is not of course a historian at all. He claimed that it was